Sustaining Indigenous Languages and Indigenous Knowledge:
Developing Community Training Approaches for the 21st Century
Margaret FLOREY (Australia)
PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa on "Language shift: Changing
patterns of language allegiance in Western Seram", Margaret Florey is a Senior Lecturer in the
Linguistics Program, Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include the
minority languages of the Austronesian and Australian language families, language
endangerment, ethnography, ethnobiology, and anthropological linguistics.
She has
conducted extensive fieldwork in the Central Maluku region of eastern Indonesia, and, earlier,
in Western Australia. Margaret is a co-founder of the Resource Network for Linguistic
Diversity, and serves on the Advisory Panel for Terralingua, Partnerships for Linguistic and
Biological Diversity.
The last decade of the twentieth century saw a great increase in international concern about
language endangerment, which is confronting minority language communities in all corners
of the globe. New organisations emerged in support of minority languages and their
communities of speakers and descendents, and philanthropic bodies and government
organisations developed new funding strategies to support language documentation. In the
twenty-first century, new challenges arise for language maintenance practitioners who
recognise that documentation is just the first stage in a long process of rebuilding an
environment which values and can sustain Indigenous knowledge.
This paper explores strategies for supporting Indigenous languages and the transmission of
Indigenous knowledge. I draw on data from Central Maluku, eastern Indonesia, a region
which is characterised by high linguistic diversity and which faces the most serious language
endangerment in Indonesia. It has been widely reported that languages spoken in Christian
villages in Maluku are becoming obsolescent more rapidly than languages spoken in villages
which historically aligned politically with the north Malukan sultanate of Ternate and
converted to Islam. In the modern era, it is apparent that threats to the transmission of
knowledge are felt across the boundaries of religious affiliation.
The Endangered Maluku Languages Project is currently documenting five languages in
Muslim and Christian ethnolinguistic communities in Central Maluku. The ELM project
embeds community training within all aspects of documentation activities. The training
philosophy aims to empower speakers of Moluccan languages and their descendents to
undertake language documentation and implement language revitalization or maintenance at
the grassroots level. I will discuss an intensive residential training program which brings
community members together with regional professionals from a range of disciplines, and
builds a resource pool from which expertise can be drawn for undertaking activities involving
both Indigenous languages and Indigenous knowledge. Community language workers will be
supported in implementing language and IK programs in their communities. These are
important developments from the perspectives of language revitalization, sustainable
knowledge, and capacity building in endangered language communities.