Linguistic, social and geographical background

Yan-nhaŋu is a Yolŋu (Pama-Nyungan) language of the Crocodile Islands of North-Eastern Arnhem Land. It is a member of the Nhaŋu dialect cluster spoken from the Crocodile Islands in the west to the Wessel Islands in the east.3 The language name literally means this language; yän (tongue or language), nhaŋu (this). This naming convention is common to most Yolŋu language varieties.4

362Many Yan-nhaŋu people now live at the ex-mission settlements on their homelands at Milingimbi and Galiwin’ku, although some also live at Maningrida (the next community to the west) and surrounding outstations. The founding of the Milingimbi Mission in 1922 brought extensive changes to the Yan-nhaŋu traditional lifestyle, not least because it involved the permanent settlement of a large number of people on Yan-nhaŋu clan lands from other Yolŋu groups. Much of the day-to-day business of Milingimbi community is run by groups other than the Yan-nhaŋu. Nonetheless Yan-nhaŋu proper names are still used by the Yolŋu (Aboriginal people) of Milingimbi to refer to sites on the Islands and in the sea. Yolŋu living at Milingimbi acknowledge the sacred links among Yan-nhaŋu and the seas of the Crocodile Islands, although the Yan-nhaŋu are one of the least politically powerful groups in the area. Migrations of larger clans from the east and a legacy of marginalisation from the day to day running of the missions provide a background to the diminution of Yan-nhaŋu language use.

There is also a Yan-nhaŋu outstation settlement on the largest of the outer Crocodile Islands of Murruŋga, some 50 kilometres from the northern Australian coast. During the period of intense inter-clan fighting immediately following the Mission settlement many Yan-nhaŋu withdrew to this island. More recently the North-Eastern Arnhem Land homelands movement of the 1970s made it possible for Yan-nhaŋu people to return more permanently to their customary outer island home, as well as to travel more easily among Murruŋga outstations and the larger settlements on their other island homelands. Murruŋga Island is these days a focal point of Yan-nhaŋu identity and a large part of language work has involved recording subject matter related to this place (Yan-nhaŋu Language Team, forthcoming; James, forthcoming; Bagshaw 1998).

Historically Yan-nhaŋu speakers have had extensive ceremonial, cultural and economic links with other Yolŋu groups as well as with speakers of genetically unrelated languages further west. They are active participants in the extensive social networks that crisscross the whole of the Arnhem Land region. For example, Yan-nhaŋu women marry into other language groups including Dhuwal and Dhuwala speaking groups in the east, Djinaŋ and Djinba language groups to the south, and Burarra to the west (Keen 1978, pp. 130, 138; Bagshaw 1998 pp. 156–77).

The linguistic situation at Milingimbi is complex and many people are bi- or multilingual. Yan-nhaŋu people now generally speak Dhuwal (also known as Djambarrpuyŋu) in day-to-day interaction. Prestige languages in the area include local variants of Dhuwala (Gupapuyŋu) and Dhuwal at Milingimbi, Ganalbiŋu (Djinba) at the nearby community of Ramingining, and those residing at Maningrida regularly speak Burarra (Gun-nartpa) and English; all of these languages are exerting pressure on Yan-nhaŋu. Many Yan-nhaŋu people speak some English and most also know something of other more distant languages in the region, including Rembarrŋa and Gunwinygu.363

Yan-nhaŋu itself is not a homogeneous language (Bowern 2008). There are six patrilectal or clan varieties; three are Dhuwa, three Yirritja.5 Not all the varieties are still spoken and most of the speakers involved in language work come from the Mäḻarra and Gamaḻaŋga clans. In addition to the small number of fluent speakers between the ages of 40 and 80 there are approximately 150 heritage owners with patrilineal ancestral connections to Yan-nhaŋu language, land, sea and madayin (sacred paraphernalia), and a further 120 Yirritja Burrara/Yan-nhaŋu (Gamal, Gidjingali, and Anbarra) people with language ownership rights. Table 1 provides information on the Yan-nhaŋu groups, their moiety, and the number of people belonging to each (see also Bagshaw 1998, p. 157).

The complex relationships among groups are mapped through the idiom of kinship. Marriage in this area is exogamous so husband and wife will always be from different moieties and different clans. The Yan-nhaŋu groups signify their identities as separate from more distant groups primarily through reference to language rather than any distinct cultural practices. This linguistic identification includes groups speaking languages other than Yan-nhaŋu, so that purely linguistic classifications are not without ambiguities. The Gamal and Bindararr are referred to with the Ŋurruwulu as the Walamaŋu bäpurru (patrigroups) consistent with the logic of their ritual linkages (James, forthcoming, p. 92). Gamal people identify as Yan-nhaŋu but speak Burarra as ‘their’ language. This is relevant in a revitalisation program when part of the target group for language revitalisation expresses intellectual property of the language and

364wish to have a say in the revitalisation and description process, but have no intention of shifting towards speaking the language themselves.6

Dhuwa Yan-nhaŋu patri-groups may also call themselves Märinga based on ritual associations. The three clans refer to each other as yapa-manydji (sister-dyad).7 That is, kinship terms are used to denote the relationship among the clan groups. In certain contexts they may also refer to each other as märi-manydji (grandchild/grandparent-dyad). We include this information about the way that the patri-groups talk about their relationships to one another because it shows the cohesiveness of the Yan-nhaŋu speech community, despite evident patri-linguistic differences. The same type of cohesion exists among the Yirritja Yan-nhaŋu groups, which are known collectively as Malkurra. Myths and stories, shared country and secular ceremonial and marital links further strengthen alliances among these groups who also refer to each other as sister or company in Aboriginal English.

Despite the small number of Yan-nhaŋu speakers in each patri-group there is a great degree of cooperation among the Yan-nhaŋu-speaking patri-groups and the different varieties can be treated as a single language for the purposes of linguistic description. We leave aside for the moment the problems involved in deciding how much of the variation among speakers should be attributed to idiolects and how much to differences in clan language, although we note the considerable technical problems in providing a coherent description of a language where each variety is spoken by perhaps only a few family members.

Previous research on Yan-nhaŋu

Almost all of what has been recorded for Yan-nhaŋu before the last few years comes from incidental notes in ethnographic descriptions. Between 1926 and 1929 Lloyd Warner carried out fieldwork at Milingimbi Mission. In 1937 he published his ethnography, A Black Civilization. His account of Yolŋu life is primarily concerned with Yolŋu groups that in-migrated to Milingimbi Mission from the east. He produced extensive discussion of local social organisation, material culture, technology and warfare. Despite living on the Yan-nhaŋu island of Milingimbi, his focus on the whole Murngin (Yolŋu) culture bloc largely obscures the differences between Yan-nhaŋu and the more numerous speakers of Central Yolŋu varieties such as Dhuwal and Dhuwala. Later ethnographers – among them Thomson (1939, 1949), Berndt (1951), and Keen (1978, 1994) – also describe the characteristics of the larger terrestrial group which they call the Yolŋu, touching only briefly on the Yan-nhaŋu and again glossing over the linguistic peculiarities of the most western of the North East Arnhem Land Yolŋu. Each of these works contains some pan-Yolŋu terminology and some vocabulary peculiar to Yan-nhaŋu, but no detailed linguistic information.

365There has been some desultory descriptive work on the Yan-nhaŋu language but very little before the work of the current Yan-nhaŋu language team, a collaboration among the authors of this paper, Salome Harris and six Yan-nhaŋu speakers; Laurie Baymarrwaŋa, Allison Warrŋayun (dec.), Laurie Milinḏitj, Rayba Nyaŋbal, Rita Gularrbanga and Margaret Nyuŋunyuŋu. Ray Wood and Barry Alpher both made brief recordings with Buthugurrulil (dec.) in the 1970s and Joy Kinslow Harris wrote down some words and a few short stories with Miḻmiḻpini (dec.) and Djarrga (dec.). The Milingimbi Literature Production Centre made a few storybooks with traditional stories. Gamaḻaŋga clan songs have been recorded by Alice Moyle (1962, 1974) and Ian Keen (1974).

The current phase of Yan-nhaŋu language work began in 1993 with the training of three of the Yan-nhaŋu language team at Batchelor College’s School of Australian Linguistics. Rita Gularrbanga produced almost single-handedly a preliminary dictionary of about 350 items, arranged by initial syllable and with equivalents in Djambarrpuyŋu and English. This formed the basis for later dictionary work by the Yan-nhaŋu language team. In 1994 James in collaboration with senior Yan-nhaŋu initiated the Yan-nhaŋu dictionary team. In 1997 he intitiated bilingual classes recording the outcomes in his masters thesis (1999). In 2003 James et-al published the draft Yan-nhaŋu dictionary of 1800 forms.

James’ PhD work focuses on the cosmological, sociological, ecological and economic dimensions of Yan-nhaŋu marine identity based on extensive work in species identification, site mapping and recording mythological narratives starting in 1993. The draft dictionary (James 2003) is being edited, revised and expanded in work by Harris and Bowern with the rest of the Yan-nhaŋu language team. Emphasis has been placed on illustrative example sentences, translation equivalents among Yan-nhaŋu, Djambarrpuyŋu and English, and the English–Yan-nhaŋu section has been greatly expanded. Thirdly, Bowern has completed a draft learners’ guide that has been circulated at Milingimbi (Bowern et al. 2005) and has gathered the materials for a grammatical description of the language. She has also been working with the Yan-nhaŋu teachers at Murruŋga outstation school to build a small collection of language resources and activity ideas for school lessons as part of a language revitalisation project. Furthermore, she has been involved in language training work designed to help Yan-nhaŋu speakers produce their own resource materials. In a recent collaboration James has set up a project enhancing the intergenerational transmission of Yan-nhaŋu language and Yan-nhaŋu Ecological Knowledge (YEK) through an online (talking) pictorial encyclopedia. The online database will be linked to preschool Yan-nhaŋu ‘Language Nests’ and a Sea Ranger Program on the islands.

In summary there was no detailed work on the language before the 1990s, but in the last few years activity has steadily increased and at present there are several approaches to revitalisation and description.366

The linguistic prospects for language revitalisation

The Yan-nhaŋu language team was formed with the twin aims of language description and revitalisation. On the one hand it comprises the Yan-nhaŋu speakers who are interested in working with linguists to describe and document the language. The team has the further aim of facilitating the use of Yan-nhaŋu in a wider sphere than its current use, including its introduction at Murruŋga school where all the children have ownership rights to the Yan-nhaŋu language through one or other parent. Yan-nhaŋu speakers have frequently expressed their desire to see their language more widely used and the language team is a collaborative effort to see this realised. Another strong focus has been the documentation of as much of the language as possible. Speakers are very aware of the fragile state of the language and wish to make use of linguists and technology to record as much Yan-nhaŋu as possible.

On the face of it, however, revitalisation programs are doomed to failure. Yan-nhaŋu language learning is not a high priority for heritage owners. As is often the case in such projects, the impetus for language documentation and for increasing the use of the language comes from those who already speak it, not from those who do not.8

Entrenched patterns of language use are also against adding to the number of speakers. Even those who speak Yan-nhaŋu fluently are in the habit of speaking to their children and grandchildren in Djambarrpuyŋu; they also frequently use Djambarrpuyŋu or Burarra with each other, even when all parties are fluent in Yan-nhaŋu. Language revitalisation in this case would mean not only teaching the language to those who do not speak it; it would also involve changing the linguistic habits of remaining speakers.

In the public domain Djambarrpuyŋu is the lingua franca among Yolŋu at Milingimbi, and English is used with the non-Indigenous school and government service providers, such as store managers, teachers and nurses. Church services are conducted in a mixture of Djambarrpuyŋu, Gupapuyŋu, and English as well as a fourth, hybrid language of Gupapuyŋu and English. Yan-nhaŋu is not spoken at all outside the clan groups who own it – unlike Djambarrpuyŋu/Dhuwal, for example, which is a lingua franca, or Djinaŋ or Gumatj, which are known to some extent by people without primary ties to these languages (see further Amery 1993). Therefore the linguistic ecology of Milingimbi is already well divided into areas where English, Djambarrpuyŋu, Burarra and other languages are used, and Yan-nhaŋu people, who are already fluent in these other languages have no need to redistribute these patterns of language use other than as a political or social statement. Yan-nhaŋu has very low prestige at Milingimbi outside the Yan-nhaŋu clans. Yan-nhaŋu is sometimes said by other people to be a worthless, simple language spoken by intellectually inferior people. That is, Yan-nhaŋu

367people are subject to all the usual unimaginative prejudices that are often held against speakers of endangered languages.

Finally, within the sphere of education, Djambarrpuyŋu and Burarra, along with other Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory, are themselves under threat from English-only or English-dominant policies. At the time of writing the proposal to mandate at least four hours of English instruction per day for all schools was being held over, but more general pressure against bilingual programs continues. Ironically, just at the time there is an increase in language materials for a school program, there is a decrease in the possibilities for utilising those materials in the formal curriculum. What, therefore, is the point in running a revitalisation project when it is almost guaranteed not to produce any more Yan-nhaŋu speakers?

Successes

We argue that the revitalisation project has brought considerable positive outcomes for Yan-nhaŋu people at Milingimbi, even if it has not produced any more speakers of the language.

First there has been the raising of the profile of the Yan-nhaŋu language within the Milingimbi community. The presence of a linguist has raised Yan-nhaŋu self-confidence, particularly in using Yan-nhaŋu in public. For example, at the funeral of a Yan-nhaŋu woman in July 2004, several people spoke publicly in Yan-nhaŋu and one speaker, who began her speech in Djambarrpuyŋu, was heckled and told to speak in Yan-nhaŋu (Bowern, field tapes 14–17, 2004).

This increase in language profile is also manifested in increased confidence in asserting authenticity/efficacy of linguistic links to traditional sites, practices and experiences in Yan-nhaŋu country. Based largely on James’ linguistic and ethnographic work meetings to determine land rights’ management (as part of the Aboriginal Land Rights [Northern Territory] Act) with the Northern Land Council (NLC) have also resulted in the public reassertion of Yan-nhaŋu rights to country and marine estates. There has been considerable progress towards setting up a turtle management program and breeding sanctuary on Gurriba Island in the north of Yan-nhaŋu country. These combined projects have been instrumental in further supporting the continuation of links with marine sites and in the intergenerational transmission of cultural and ecological knowledge; for example, marine pharmacopoeia, turtle management, and ancestor spirit consultation. Thus the language project has been beneficial in promoting the transmission of cultural knowledge (although primarily through Dhuwal, not Yan-nhaŋu); this transmission places Yan-nhaŋu people in a better position to defend their rights to country in future. This in turn places them in a better position to negotiate for division of things like royalties. Importantly, these projects have been conducted primarily by Yolŋu themselves, and not by outsiders.

A further result of this research has been the increased profile of Yan-nhaŋu as a distinct group in relation to sites, sea country and marine resources in academic research. For 368example, the Northern Territory museum is investigating their sea country, the NLC is researching their sites and genealogies, and the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance is investigating their turtle management strategies. The Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority has launched an investigation of Yan-nhaŋu sacred and archaeological sites. All of these projects employ Yan-nhaŋu people and promote exchanges of knowledge between Yan-nhaŋu people and researchers.

The presence of a linguist in the community has increased the use of Yan-nhaŋu among speakers and part-speakers and has, at least temporarily, altered the dynamic of language use in favour of Yan-nhaŋu. Bowern does not speak Djambarrpuyŋu fluently and frequently the only language that all members of the language team had in common is Yan-nhaŋu since not all Yan-nhaŋu speakers speak English. This ruled out Djambarrpuyŋu and English as lingua francas in such circumstances and increased the use of Yan-nhaŋu. It also increased the use of Yan-nhaŋu by part speakers who had someone else of similar ability to talk to. It remains to be seen whether this will have any longer term implications.

The project has been highly collaborative and has resulted in the transfer of literacy skills from Gupapuyŋu and Djambarrpuyŋu to Yan-nhaŋu. Yan-nhaŋu speakers had a great deal of control over what went into the documentation and the format of the end result. They proof-read the draft of the dictionary and have had editorial control over content from the beginning.

Positive experiences working with linguists have led the Yan-nhaŋu speakers to go to extraordinary lengths in working on the documentation program. This has resulted in large amounts of material being recorded. Bowern has been at Milingimbi for a total of 19 weeks over three years. A six-week field trip resulted in (among other things) the recording of all the material for the learners’ guide, extensive dictionary expansion (approximately another 1500 items, doubling the number of headwords), and textual recording and transcription. The second, eight-week trip was focused on extensive elicitation and narrative recording, proof-reading the entire Yan-nhaŋu dictionary for publication, and checking of previous materials. The third trip included the creation of Djambarrpuyŋu–Yan-nhaŋu parallel translations for the dictionary, further grammatical materials, sociolinguistic interviews, and conversation data to record language in use. If and when heritage learners want to learn Yan-nhaŋu in future, they will have much more material to work from than they would otherwise have had.

A further corollary of this increase in publications is the increased awareness of the existence of the Yan-nhaŋu group in the anthropological and linguistic literature. The NLC had thought the Bindarra were extinct and the Gorryindi comprised of only one living person. This is of some importance to the Yan-nhaŋu patri-groups, who are worried about their knowledge being passed over and assigned to other groups. For example, Margaret Nyuŋunyuŋu related a conversation she had had with an anthropologist who told her that he had thought that the Gamaḻaŋga patri-group had been absorbed into another clan and its members had all passed away, and how disenfranchised it made her feel.369

Conclusion

Endangered language reporting is often accompanied by gloom and doom and so we have emphasised the positive outcomes of recent Yan-nhaŋu language work. The difficulties in reversing a shift in language use are enormous and are not ultimately up to the linguist, although the linguist can be a help where the community itself is willing. We do not think that the linguistic work here will result in any more speakers of Yan-nhaŋu, even though we have been working with the central aim of linguistic revitalisation, but these projects are creating opportunities for the use of language on country where it counts.

However language revitalisation projects can do good even if they don’t achieve the ‘rebirth’ of a language. We have shown here that language projects are not simply about language; they encompass issues of language use, culture, society and politics as well, and they can have a positive effect on non-linguistic spheres of culture and society. Therefore, importantly, we should not measure a revitalisation program’s success or failure solely by the number of speakers recruited (see Amery 2000). By that yardstick the Yan-nhaŋu program was a failure. It is highly unlikely that the Yan-nhaŋu-owning communities will suddenly change entrenched patterns of language use. But equally clearly, the Yan-nhaŋu project was not a failure on any objective scale as it continues to build and encourage opportunities for the use of Yan-nhaŋu language in practical projects for Yan-nhaŋu people on their traditional homelands.

Another important point is the relationship between language documentation and language revitalisation. There is a theme in the literature that documentation should play second fiddle to revitalisation materials such as children’s readers or alphabet books, and that salvage work (recording as much of a language as possible before the last speakers pass away) is in essence a type of media migration; transferring knowledge from a speaker’s head to an archive which fossilises the language (Reyhner et al. 1999) and renders speakers almost unnecessary. In the Yan-nhaŋu case, intensive documentation has not relegated the language to a ‘museum piece’ (see Dauenhauer 2005 for further discussion of this). On the contrary, enthusiasm for the documentation project remains high and speakers have articulated a sense of relief that aspects of their language are now safely preserved for future generations. Yan-nhaŋu knowledge (both in the language and of the language) is valuable to its owners, who want to take care of it. Therefore we prefer the metaphor of ‘backup creation’ rather than media migration or the creation of a museum piece.

In short, the result of the Yan-nhaŋu language team’s work has been to change Yan-nhaŋu from a very fragile language in the extremely endangered category with almost no documentation, to a somewhat less fragile language with good basic documentation whose speakers are now better off than they were before, and in a number of ways. Further, language revitalisation projects contribute in an important way to the future prospects of Yan-nhaŋu children and the use of their language in the Crocodile Islands. By all accounts this is a relatively happy result.370

Acknowledgements

Claire Bowern gratefully acknowledges the support of the Hans Rausing Foundation’s Endangered Language Documentation Project who provided a field trip grant (FTG0010) to cover her expenses in the 2004 and 2005 field seasons, and National Science Foundation BCS-844550 for the 2007 trip.

Bentley James would like to thank the Yan-nhaŋu for the ongoing privilege of working on their language and living on their sea country.
 

References