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Linguists at The University of Western Australia are in a race against time to understand how Australian Aboriginal languages conceptualise time, before their last speakers die.

In many cases, languages have already disappeared without a trace and in others, only a handful of elders still speak the language of their parents.

Professor Alan Dench and Associate Professor Eve-Marie Ritz are working on a major collaborative project with linguists from Melbourne, Paris, Manchester and Leuven (Belgium) Universities to analyse languages from communities in the Pilbara, the Northern Territory, Torres Strait and Cape York.

Understanding the ways in which all humans employ grammar to express concepts such as past/present/future, the sequencing of events, necessity and possibility, is the work of linguistic semantics - and this has not yet been done in any detail with Australian Aboriginal languages, Associate Professor Ritz said.

Professor Dench has spent the past 30 years working on Australian Aboriginal languages. His 1995 book, Martuthunira: Language in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia, was written with the help of Martuthunira's last speaker, elder Algie Paterson, who died within days of its publication, but content in the knowledge that his language would not be forgotten.

"There's an urgent need to document what is still known of Australian Aboriginal languages and to analyse aspects of them, such as the ways in which their different grammars reflect concepts found in every language," said Associate Professor Ritz. "What we learn may well influence the direction of future theoretical work in understanding the expression of time in natural language."

With their co-researchers in an EC funded International Researcher Exchange Scheme, the UWA pair will analyse a large body of existing texts to develop hypotheses about how each language system codes time, and then design questions that can be put to speakers to test their hypotheses.

Associate Professor Ritz said she became interested in Australian Aboriginal languages while working on contemporary Australian English which, interestingly, reflects medieval French in its use of the present perfect tense to describe an event in the past.

Media references

Associate Professor Marie-Eve Ritz (+61 8) 6488 3513
Professor Alan Dench (+61 8) 6488 2865
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs) (+61 8) 6488 5563 / (+61 4) 32 637 716