Endangered language revitalisation through song
A Feature by Jill Vaughan and Josef Tye
Northern Irish hip hop trio Kneecap has been making waves in more ways than one. As activists and advocates for the Irish language, their impact has been particularly significant. The band’s first single C.E.A.R.T.A. (‘rights’) is loosely based on band member Móglaí Bap’s experience when his friend exerted his right to use Irish while under arrest. The song is a caricature of anti-authoritarian west Belfast youth culture, depicting run-ins with police and drug taking, but makes clear that the Irish language is held in high esteem for the band:
Brisim achan riail, seachas focan caol le caol
I break every rule except ‘slender with slender*’.
*a reference to a spelling rule in Irish requiring the vowels either side of a consonant to match (slender vowels (i, e) vs. broad vowels (a, o, u)
For Kneecap, Irish is a living language that is simply a part of their daily lives in Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter. But it is also part and parcel of their politics, an embodied stance of resistance against British cultural and political hegemony and its impacts in the north.
We’d choose old words from a hundred years ago and regenerate them, which helped turbocharge the subculture.
Móglaí Bap
Kneecap are part of a wave of contemporary Irish artists using the language. A far-cry from the trailblazing folk-inspired artists of the ’80s and ’90s like Claddad, Enya and The Corrs, big acts like Kneecap, CMAT and Hozier are bringing the Irish language to international stages in new ways. Their presence on the Irish cultural scene has had measurable impacts not only on the language itself but also on attitudes to the language. This is particularly striking among young people in the north especially, with numbers of students taking the language at GCSE level on the rise despite a wider fall in students studying languages.
Linguistic diversity and endangerment
Across the globe, many indigenous language communities are striving to revitalise their languages. 2022-2032 has been declared the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages to draw attention to the immense cultural importance of linguistic diversity, as well as to mobilise people and resources in supporting it. As the late Wadawurrung elder Tandop David Tournier explains:
Because Language is Culture, Culture is Language, Language is Land, Land is Language, Family, Language, Language, Family. . . . One can’t live without the other. And when the people realise that, they may have a better understanding, and will understand why Language is so important to us, to revive these languages.
(quoted in Stebbins, Eira & Couzens 2017: vi)
Languages do not become endangered due to any inherent characteristic. Instead, they are driven to endangerment through active processes of marginalisation, colonisation and colonial nation building or assimilation. They are not just minority languages, but also actively ‘minoritised’.
Staying strong: First Nations languages
We can readily observe the active minoritisation of languages in our own region, with all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages now under threat. Yet in spite of this enormous pressure, around 120 languages are spoken today, with a dozen traditional – and several new – Indigenous languages still acquired by children as a first language. In addition, inspiring work is being done across the country to revitalise and nurture languages that are no longer spoken daily.
Resistance through language and music
Kneecap’s impact is evidence that music can be a powerful form of language revitalisation. Songs are often considered to be ‘crown jewels’ of cultural and linguistic heritage, and are a common way to encounter one’s heritage language. In writing of their experiences with Basque and Scottish Gaelic revitalisation, scholars Begoña Echeverria and Heather Sparling emphasise the centrality of music, song, and dance to linguistic identity:
We believe that music provides unique emotional and social affordances when it comes to a language’s status, acquisition and corpus planning – affordances crucial to tap when it comes to heritage languages in particular, given the strong affective and identity links that often obtain between heritage languages and their speakers.
Music belongs to the home-family-neighborhood-community domains that are so essential to intergenerational language transmission, and can also play a significant role in language revitalisation. Music is fun, music is social. It provides unique affordances for emotional expression. And a song is the ultimate meme – it can make a language more visible and memorable and can even help it go viral.
Examples abound around the world: from punta-rock in Garifuna (Belize) to pop-folk in Chulym (Siberia) or Jèrriais (Channel Islands), communities are using old and new songs to breathe new life into their languages. The international appetite for seeing linguistic diversity represented in art seems to be growing.
In Australia, song has always been central to language keeping and storytelling. This is felt powerfully among the Yorta Yorta people, including co-author Josef Tye.
Take the song Ngarra Burra Ferra, a Yorta Yorta translation of the African-American spiritual Turn Back Pharoah’s Army. It was introduced in 1887, at the Maloga mission in New South Wales, by the African-American travelling Fisk Jubilee Singers. The song’s theme of escaping enslavement resonated with the Yorta Yorta’s own experiences of colonisation.
Translated by Yorta Yorta Elder Theresa Clements, and transposed by Tye’s great-great Grampa Thomas Shadrach James, Ngarra Burra Ferra became a powerful act of defiance and language preservation. It would go on to feature in the 2012 film The Sapphires.
In the Victorian context, language revitalisation is a key component of resistance to colonial oppression. It also plays a crucial role in implementing communities’ ambitions around Truth Telling and Treaty.
Many Victorians are unaware they’re speaking terms from Indigenous languages every day. The linguistic landscapes of Victoria and Naarm are rich with Indigenous names and words, and should serve as a reminder of the First Peoples of this continent.
Activating First Nations languages through song
Many contemporary Australian artists are centring First Nations languages in their music and performances. Performers like Yothu Yindi, Warumpi Band, Saltwater Band and Gurrumul paved the way for popular contemporary acts like Baker Boy, King Stingray and Electric Fields. The public’s enthusiastic response suggests a bright future for musicians who look beyond English in their work. Here are five artists leading the way:
Emily Wurramurra
A Warnindhilyagwa woman, Wurramara sings blues and roots in Anindilyakwa – the language of Groote Eylandt – and English. Her 2024 album Nara won the ARIA Award for Best Adult Contemporary Album, making Wurramara the first Indigenous woman to win the award. She was also named Artist of the Year at the National Indigenous Music Awards.
Ripple Effect
This all-female rock band from Maningrida (north-central Arnhem Land) sings about country, bush food, local animals and mythological beings in five languages: Ndjébbana, Burarra, Na-kara, Kune and English. Ripple Effect broke new ground in bringing female voices into Maningrida’s already prolific music scene. Their song Ngúddja (“language”) explicitly celebrates Maningrida’s linguistic diversity.
Neil Morris (DRMNGNOW)
A Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung and Wiradjuri yiyirr (“man”), Morris weaves together hip-hop, experimental electronic elements and sound design to explore Indigenous rights and culture in his work as DRMNGNOW. A passionate language advocate, he entwines Yorta Yorta language revitalisation with muluna (“spirit”), Yenbena (“ancestors”) and Woka (“Country”). His latest release Pray is out now.
Aaron Wyatt
Noongar man Wyatt is a violist, composer, conductor and academic, as well as the first Indigenous Australian to conduct a major Australian orchestra. He has conducted works that have been trailblazers of language revitalisation, such as Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse’s opera Wundig Wer Wilura in Noongar and Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s children’s opera Parrwang Lifts the Sky, sung partly in Wadawurrung.
Jessie Lloyd
A musician, historian and song-keeper, Lloyd founded the Mission Songs Project to collect songs from the Aboriginal mission era. She recently launched the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Songbook to support schools in bringing Indigenous music into the classroom.
For First Nations languages to thrive in the music scene and beyond, they need support through grassroots initiatives in communities, schools and public life. One such example is an award-winning song project run by Bulman School in the Northern Territory. This project is revitalising the local Dalabon and Rembarrnga languages, showing music can be a powerful and fun way to keep languages strong.
Embracing multilingualism
Australia still suffers from a bad case of the ‘monolingual mindset’ – a nefarious ideology that came part and parcel with the modern nation-state. This mindset blinds us to the very real cultural, socio-emotional and economic benefits of embracing multilingualism, a practice which also supports the maintenance of First Nations languages.
Multilingualism has been a norm and a necessity throughout human history. Yet there is still much to learn from the diversity of multilingual practices around the world. Recent work from co-author Jill Vaughan, in collaboration with language speakers from Arnhem Land in northern Australia, demonstrates that multilingualism serves many purposes beyond facilitating everyday conversation. It also plays a central role in social and cultural etiquette, identity construction, showing respect as a guest on Country, ensuring safety from dangerous spirits, and enriching storytelling and song.
In Indigenous Australia, language is strongly connected with land, clan groups, Dreamings and cultural practice. These elements are woven together too in origin stories, such as the Warramurrungunji story of north-west Arnhem Land.
Beliefs and practices like these, along with high levels of multilingualism, support the viability and ongoing co-existence of many languages, even very small ones of just a few dozen speakers. The multilingualism of northern Australia is echoed in other Indigenous language hotspots across the world.
The threat of language loss poses a serious risk to our nation’s cultural inheritance, and to the wellbeing of many Indigenous Australians. Embracing and better understanding multilingualism is one way to help maintain traditional languages and support Australia’s linguistic diversity. Where communities are supported to strengthen, use and teach their languages within multilingual language ecologies the benefits for cultural and emotional wellbeing are clear.
Jill Vaughan is a linguist based at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research centres on the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, language variation and critical sociolinguistics, drawing on work with speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages, heritage language and new speaker communities. Her recent work involves research and community language support in the linguistically diverse and highly multilingual region of Arnhem Land, northern Australia.
Josef Tye is a Yorta Yorta (James Family) and Boonwurrung (Briggs Family) man. He is currently Director of Indigenous Innovation and Experiences Programs at Monash University. Josef serves on the Yorta Yorta Traditional Owner Land Management Board which is responsible for the implementation of the Joint Management Agreement between Yorta Yorta and the State Government for the custodianship of Barmah State Forest. He has partially completed a Master of Applied Linguistics and is currently supporting language work for both Yorta Yorta and Boonwurrung.
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