Guest post by Chips Mackinolty*
While “we speak our mother’s tongue” is a universal truism, it is something often forgotten in the context of colonialism and the overt and extended suppression of Indigenous languages across what is now called Australia. How can a “mother’s tongue” be spoken if the children have been taken away? If languages in schools are banned?
How can languages survive?
There are no simple answers to these and related questions, but the Warlpiri people of central Australia, from Nyirrpi and Yuendumu through to Lajamanu, have taken a major step towards protecting their “mother’s tongue” for future generations with the long-awaited Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
I’ve had a lifetime passion for dictionaries, and since my teen years for languages other than English. Childhood memories of lying on the floor, trawling through the Merriam Webster (it was too damn big and heavy to move up to a table and chair!). Followed, with a first-year high school stint in London, and regular holidays in Europe, exposure to so many non-English tongues, their alphabets … and their dictionaries.
And then, of course, being exposed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages when I moved north over 40 years ago … and the inevitable incorporation of Indigenous languages into my graphic artwork. And that, from the early 1980s, meant my first involvement with the Warlpiri language on monthly art trips to Lajamanu. And that meant working with people whose passion for their language was paramount.
I was not aware of it at the time, but work on the Warlpiri dictionary was well underway since the 1970s, leading us half a century on, giving birth to this year’s Aboriginal Studies Press publication.
And it nudges in size and weight to the Merriam Webster at just under 1400 pages!
But nonetheless a treasure to trawl through. The sheer scale of the work is most remarkable, as it has involved so many Warlpiri and other people across the years in their painstaking work in capturing the length and breadth of this extraordinary language. It takes us through nuances of meanings in different contexts and circumstances. It is not just a dictionary of single words with single meanings, but the ways in which the language can take so many subtleties and usages, and how they appear in speech.
And, of course, it takes us through words that have been coined from English as a result of colonial interactions, and ways of looking at meanings that can change with history.
The word for copper? Pilijimani! Car? Kaya. Money? Maniyi. And ways in which Warlpiri Law responds to the outside world, such as the “re-naming”, after the death of a woman called Alice, Kumunjayi Springs, and Katherine as KTH. Kumunjayi as an avoidance word that simultaneously observes, honours and recalls the name of the dead.
This dictionary is more than just an extraordinary endeavour in language preservation, but very much one of sharing Warlpiri with the rest of the world—something that the Lajamanu Warlpiri people always emphasised to me as a visiting kartiya or when the Yawulyu Dancers visited me in KTH and Darwin—or Kara Wiri as I was firmly told on their visit to the NT capital one year. (Big Saltwater!)
My first venture into incorporating Warlpiri into graphic art was at Lajamanu, working with local friends and linguist extraordinaire Marlurrku Paddy Patrick Jangala, who translated text for me—regularly changing my English texts for the better through the process of back translation. And putting up with me as I rang him from Wollongong where I was printing the work as I would check with him—he on the school radio telephone—on particular spellings.
But always with great humour and a smile. I remember running into him as he was leaving the Hasty Tasty at the Lajamanu store with a bag of hot chips in his hand. He looked at me, down at his lunch, and back at me with a broad grin. “You know, Japanangka, when you die we’ll have to change the menu here!”
You can purchase your own copy of the Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary from the Aboriginal Studies Press or from the excellent independent bookseller Red Kangaroo Books in Mparntwe.