Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Sunday, I was delighted to join the Ekushe Academy to celebrate International Mother Language Day. It is a day celebrated on 21 February all around the world, and it is a day that commemorates an event in Bengali history of particular significance to our Bengali Australian community when the Bengalis fought for the right to speak their own language. A protest began on 21 February and four students were killed marching for the right to speak to their language: Abdus Salam, Rafiq Ahmed, Abul Barkat and Abdul Jabbar. My community commemorates their death and their contribution every year.

A language, of course, is much more than words; it actually contains the way a community shares information and ideas. It is, in every sense, culture. As we celebrate International Mother Language Day, it is worth reflecting on the fact that the world loses a language every 14 days. Every 14 days one more language disappears. The most recent one, the Bo language, a language spoken in India's Andaman Islands, died with its last remaining speaker, Boa Senior, earlier this month. When Boa Senior's parents died some 40 years ago she became the last remaining speaker of that language which is over 70,000 years old. It is said that she was very lonely. She had to learn other languages and other ways to communicate. That Bo language is one of two languages that the Andaman Islands have lost in the last three months.

In Australia, that is a story that we have lived many times. Most of our 250 Indigenous languages are already gone—an extraordinary loss, not just to our Indigenous people and not just to Australia but to the world as a whole. Only 13 of those languages are still commonly spoken and another 110 have just a handful of speakers, all over the age of 40. Over the next two to three decades, we will live the experience of the Andaman Islands in the loss of languages that date back tens of thousands of years and hold concepts which cannot be expressed in any other language.

I spoke to a young Australian constituent of mine recently whose parents are from India. He speaks Hindi and English equally well, and he was telling me how amazing it is that sometimes he cannot say what he wants to say in one language or the other, even though he speaks them both equally, because the concept in Hindi, which comes from a different place, cannot actually be said in English words and vice versa. So we have this richness in Australia of our modern languages, even as we lose so many that we have had before. Dharug, which is the mother language of the country on which I live, is not spoken very often, but if you come to Parramatta I will say to you, 'Gia wullawa nullawulla,' which is Dharug for 'come and rest a while'.