The world’s languages are dying at a rate of one a fortnight, but an Aboriginal tongue has been brought back to life.

Much has been written about the need for ecological diversity to maintain a balanced ecosystem. Yet in the City of Churches an equally profound revolution is taking place that has linguists all over the world talking the resurrection of a dead Aboriginal language.

Ninna marni? Are you good? Marniai. I’m good. Wanti ninna? Where are you going? Wodlianna. Going home.

That’s Kaurna, the language of the original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plain, the Kaurna people. It was effectively dead by 1900. It suffered the fate of many Aboriginal people: dispersal, disease, infighting and assimilation. English buried their tongue.

Linguists estimate that when Europeans arrived, there were more than 250 Aboriginal languages. Today no more than 25 Aboriginal languages are spoken daily.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community’s history and a large part of its cultural identity. We think in language. It is Logos, the Word. It is the code through which we make sense of the world. It makes us self-aware. Our art, culture and scientific discoveries come to us through language.

The only record of the Kaurna language was a tiny dictionary and some song sheets compiled in 1840 by Kaurna elders and two German missionaries, Clamor Schurmann and Christian Teichelmann, who ran a school for Aboriginal children in Adelaide.

The pair were not cane-wielding Bible-bashers who sought to eradicate the local language. They were Christian linguists who meticulously recorded the Kaurna language knowing that it faced extinction. They saved more than they knew.

The dictionary lay buried in an Adelaide library until it was unearthed in 1960. And there it might have stayed until in the early 1990s linguist Dr Rob Amery and members of the Kaurna community decided to “rebuild” the language and teach it to schoolchildren and adults.

This was an epic undertaking. Amery and the Kaurna community had been left a smattering of words, but constructing the grammar was another matter.

“In 1990 Teichelmann’s dictionary was pretty much all we had of the Kaurna language. There were other materials around but they had not been produced or collated. Some were not reliable and didn’t tell us much about the grammar,” Amery says.

His comprehensive research turned up some prayer books written in Kaurna back in the missionary days. By identifying the tunes, he could also translate some of the words into English. This was enough to build a “grammar spine”.

It took Amery and others 10 years to become confident enough to teach the resurrected language in schools.

“For the Kaurna people, it was an act of identity. For me, I just got interested in the language for its own sake. I could also see what being involved in this language stuff was doing for some individuals. It changed their lives completely,” Amery says.

He is aware that the reborn language is not identical to that spoken 300 years ago on the eastern shore of St Vincent’s Gulf.

“We don’t know everything, and some words have been lost forever, but what we have is the grammar and a vocabulary of more than 2000 words.”

Amery underplays his part in the rebuilding of the Kaurna language, but this is an event of international importance. Renowned international linguist Professor David Crystal makes special mention of the Kaurna language project on his website and in his book Language Death.

There are about 6000 global languages, yet on average one perishes every two weeks, often as the last elderly speakers die. In 2002, the Bureau of Statistics found there were fewer than 3000 people who spoke an indigenous language in NSW. In 2006 that had fallen to 800. Crystal, says about half the 6000 languages will die this century.

It’s not unusual that the Australian mainstream media in the 2008 United Nations Year of Languages have failed to mention the culture-saving work of Amery and the Kaurna elders. The media tend to portray Aboriginal people as victims in a morality play, where they are either lazy and living off welfare or else battling underdogs whose dignity has been crushed.

But the Kaurna people will have none of that. They are now teaching their language in schools throughout the northern suburbs of Adelaide.

Kaurna elder Aunty Josie Agius agrees with Amery that the resurrection of the language has changed lives, giving displaced or disenfranchised Aborigines a path back to their cultural identity.

“When you start researching a language you also have to go out and meet people. We’d sit down and start talking about families and we’d use some Kaurna words, and they’d say, ‘How did you know that? That’s a word we use,’” Agius says. “You’ve got to understand just how dispersed some of us older people were. The Kaurna language is like a map not only of who your kin might be, but also a spiritual map of who you are.”

There are very few success stories of language resurrection. One of the most spectacular is modern Hebrew, reborn to serve as the official language of Israel. The Maori language in New Zealand has also been maintained by intensively exposing young children to it.

What makes the resurrection of the Kaurna language so astonishing is that it flies in the face of the global trend of language death and diminishment.

Says Crystal: “Most people have yet to develop a language conscience. But the extent of the ongoing loss in the world’s linguistic diversity is so cataclysmic that it makes the word ‘revolution’ look like an understatement.

“We should care for dying languages for the same reason we care when a species of animal of plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet. I’m talking about the intellectual and cultural diversity of the planet now not it’s biological diversity, but the issues are the same.”

In memory of Aunty Josie Agius