Applied Languages

He is a living relic and an ancient linguistic treasure. Kuku Thaypan elder Tommy George, 82, is the sole surviving fluent speaker of his language. “I’m the last of them,” said the son of an Aboriginal king. “Everybody knows that.” When the famed tracker dies, 48,000 years of oral history – from beyond the Dreamtime – dies with him.

Kuku Thaypan, one of four Aboriginal languages spoken in Quinkan country on Cape York, is destined for extinction like 120 other dialects lost across Australia since European settlement.

Despite efforts of academics, the primordial tongue and ancient secrets of the old healer handed down from generation to generation will likely vanish. It is estimated that of more than 300 specific Aboriginal languages in use pre-British arrival, there will be fewer than 100 left by 2050.

Ilana Mushin, a lecturer in linguistics and indigenous language at the University of Queensland, said language formed an integral part of a culture’s world view. “All sorts of things are expressed in traditional language from how you understand the natural world, to songs, laws, traditions, stories, how you relate to each other, and the whole philosophy of life,” she said. “All these are expressed in a language and if you don’t have that language any more some of that is translatable but some of it isn’t, so a lot of that knowledge gets lost.”

Dr Mushin said there were less than 50 indigenous languages still being regularly spoken as first languages, and that it was inevitable that many of these would become extinct. “If you have the community will then languages can be saved but if you are down to the last speaker there is not much you can do,” she said.

When his brother, medicine man George Musgrave, died three years ago, Tommy lost the only other fluent speaker of his tribal tongue. Both shared honorary doctorates for their efforts in later years trying to document their living archives of tens of thousands of years of traditional knowledge with researcher Victor Steffensen.

“It might die in the throat,” blue-eyed elder Tommy, known by his language name of Awu Laya, said yesterday. “But it stays alive in the heart.”

Read more: The Courier Mail

‘İki Dil Bir Bavul’ (On the Way to School) was one of the most admired films at the Adana Golden Boll International Film Festival. The two directors have shot many documentaries over the years but they say this was their most successful. The film won two awards at the festival: the Cinema Critics Association, or SİYAD, Best Film Award and the Yılmaz Güney Award. It will continue being talked about long after it has screened at cinemas because it confronts on ongoing problem in Turkey.

The documentary-like film’s characters are from the real world. Emre, a young teacher who comes from Denizli tries to teach Turkish, instead of primary school classes, to Kurdish children who do not even speak a word of Turkish.

The film starts with a young teacher starting his first year of teaching in an eastern village of Turkey. Yet the teacher finds himself in a small, under populated area where no one speaks Turkish, only Kurdish. His astonishment grows when he discovers that he has no water in his small apartment adjacent to the one-classroom school.

The two down-to-Earth directors, Özgür Doğan and Orhan Eskiköy, had 70 hours of footage. They placed their cameras in specific parts of the classroom for the indoor shots and sometimes waited for a moment to come. “We choose four prominent characters and built up the story mostly around them. The parents of the students sometimes joked around with Emre saying we were also learning a second language, meaning Kurdish,” Doğan said. Even though Emre became a little withdrawn in the village, still the children and parents admired him.

There have been moments Emre has had difficulties. He did not know that people in some parts of the country did not speak Turkish. He struggled to teach a new language to the children instead of teaching classes.

The film premiered at this year’s Istanbul International Film Festival, was screened in Diyarbakır and was later screened at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. The directors filmed the documentary from a neutral vantage, without giving any credit to people who might say the Kurds are terrorists or that teachers are fascists, Doğan said.

The duo spent 43,000 euros shooting the film but the whole budget for “On the Way to School” was 210,000 euros. They are now in debt but this hasn’t stopped them making films. They are eager to bring attention to issues that have not been or cannot be talked about in Turkey.

Read more: Hurriyet DailyNews