Teacher training, new dictionaries reviving South Australia's Aboriginal languages Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri

New dictionaries in Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri (above) languages, with extensive work by Adelaide University's Mary-Anne Gale and Rob Amery, have been produced. Right: The Deadly Nannas singing group perform in languages including Ngarrindjeri.
Images by Gabriella Marchant, ABC News, Adelaide.

Tailored teacher training courses and new dictionaries were helping to revive South Australian Aboriginal languages, notably Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri, in 2021.

Adelaide training provider Time Education and Training presented its first course in Aboriginal language teaching at Tauondi Aboriginal College in Port Adelaide.

New dictionaries in Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri have been based on the efforts to document the languages by three German missionaries from the Dresden Mission Society who came to Adelaide in 1838 and 1840.

This legacy was the basis for years of work by Adelaide University’s Dr Mary-Anne Gale, a Ngarrindjeri linguist, and her husband, Kaurna linguist Rob Amery, associate professor and head of linguistics in university’s arts faculty school of humanities. Gale, Amery, Dr David Wilkins and professor Jane Simpson from the Australian National University in Canberra also drew on Ngarrindjeri texts published in Ronald and Catherine Berndt's (1993) book A World That Was. The result has been the launch of new Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna dictionaries, each with hundreds more words.

A graduate of the course at Tauondi College, Kaurna woman Taylor Power-Smith, told ABC News Adelaide that  learning words spoken by her ancestors, and being able to teach them to her community, had been a way to honour those who came before her. “This is the greatest inheritance I'll ever receive and I feel so strongly that fluency will be ours, and our babies will eventually be able to speak in our mother's tongue”. She said the eradication of the language at the hands of colonial settlers was hard to forget.

Another graduate, Ngarrindjeri woman Pauline Ngopamaldi Walker planned to use her training certificate to teach others in her hometown of Murray Bridge, on Ngarrindjeri country south-east of Adelaide. Part of bringing the language to life in a modern context meant creating new Ngarrindjeri words for concepts such as a solar panel. Pauline Walker said she was going to call it a “sun blanket” or “nanggi tu:thaki” in Ngarrindjeri.