HOW CAN THE FILIPINO LANGUAGE OR THE INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES OF THE COUNTRY SLEEP AS AN EFFECTIVE WEAPON IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE PENDEMIA WE FACE NOW
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MANILA — Facing armed conflict in their hometowns in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, dozens of indigenous students moved to Manila to continue their education. But with the new coronavirus pandemic sweeping through the country and hitting the Philippine capital particularly hard, their safe zone has become a more ominous place.
A group of 68 indigenous students and their teachers have been in Manila since 2017, displaced by violent clashes in their native communities. That was the same year President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to bomb lumad (indigenous) schools for being alleged hotbeds of subversion and fronts for the outlawed New People’s Army.
The students, ranging in age from 11 to 22, are ensconced in a state university in Quezon, one of the cities that make up Metro Manila, where the COVID-19 outbreak has cast a long shadow: it has the highest recorded number of infections in the country with 464 confirmed cases and 33 deaths as of April 3.
“We are prone to coronavirus because we are evacuees,” Beverly Godofredo, a teacher, tells Mongabay. As a precaution, they have begun stockpiling vitamin C, something that was once low on their list of priorities. “Our only fighting chance is to strengthen our immune system.”
The metaphor of dying — expressed in terms such as extinction and language death — was once the operative way of speaking about Australia's endangered Indigenous languages.
It is thought that at least 250 languages were spoken across the mainland, Tasmania and the outlying islands to the north before 1788 — but that is an educated guess.
So why do Indigenous languages matter? They matter because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people matter.
"We need to talk up strong about our Aboriginal languages and the role that it does play within our communities, whether you're in Redfern or remote South Australia," says Aboriginal language worker Karina Lester.
The University of Sydney's Jakelin Troy, whose research has led to a revival in the Sydney Language, also known as Gadigal, says we "lose a little bit of our humanity" every time an Indigenous language stops being spoken.
"The indigenous languages of the world are the one that are most under threat and are least valued," says Professor Troy.
"All languages can be woken up again — but it takes a lot of effort."
As much as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are in the landscape, marking physical and geographical features such as Uluru or Purnululu, they also describe the human experience of interaction and a deep compatibility with the natural environment.
"There is so much knowledge locked into every language," says Professor Troy, who reclaimed her Ngarigu clan name — Namitj — during a speech at a conference.
Uttering just a few words in Ngarigu — the language of the high country and the Snowy Mountains — had a profound effect.
"It's funny. I keep thinking I'm over it, but it has an absolutely fundamental impact on my body and soul," she says.
Professor Troy undertook forensic research in the 1990s into the notebooks left by a naval officer from the First Fleet flagship HMS Sirius, William Dawes, from his interactions with the Gadigal people of Sydney Harbour between 1790 and 1791.
Dawes' notebooks, based largely on his interviews with a young woman named Patyegarang, were rediscovered in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1972, and their linguistic secrets were unlocked for the first time.
"I had a great empathy for the language," says Professor Troy, who grew up in Sydney but spent some of her early childhood on the road travelling across Australia with her family, hearing Aboriginal people speaking different languages.
"I can remember being quite fascinated as a young child because some it sounded a bit like English but it wasn't. And then as I got older I wondered why it was that we couldn't speak our own language — and that became a real concern for me."