Podcast episode 36: Interview with Ghil‘ad Zuckermann on revivalistics

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

In this interview, we talk to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann about language reclamation and revival in Australia and around the world.

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References for Episode 36

The Barngarla trinity: people, language, land. The Barngarla trilogy: (1) Barngarlidhi Manoo (‘Speaking Barngarla Together’): Barngarla Alphabet & Picture Book, 2019; (2) Mangiri Yarda (‘Healthy Country’): Barngarla Wellbeing and Nature, 2021; (3) Wardlada Mardinidhi (‘Bush Healing’): Barngarla Plant Medicines, 2023. Links to the digital versions of these 3 books, as well as to the Barngarla app, can be found at the following website: https://wcclp.com.au/barngarla/

Anubi, Myra, Shania Richards & Ghil‘ad Zuckermann. 2023. ‘Bringing dead languages back to life‘, People Fixing the World. BBC World Service.

Schürmann, Clamor Wilhelm. 1844. A Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language. Adelaide: Dehane. Trove

Sivak, Leda, Seth Westhead, Emmalene Richards, Stephen Atkinson, Jenna Richards, Harold Dare, Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, Graham Gee, Michael Wright, Alan Rosen, Michael Walsh, Ngiare Brown & Alex Brown. 2019. ‘“Language Breathes Life”—Barngarla Community Perspectives on the Wellbeing Impacts of Reclaiming a Dormant Australian Aboriginal Language’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, 3918. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph16203918.

Sivak, Leda, Seth Westhead, Graham Gee, Michael Wright, Alan Rosen, Stephen Atkinson, Emmalene Richards, Jenna Richards, Harold Dare, Ngiare Brown, Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Michael Walsh, Natasha J. Howard & Alex Brown. 2023. ‘Developing the Indigenous Language and Wellbeing Survey: approaches to integrating qualitative findings into a survey instrument’, AlterNative. DOI: 10.1177/11771801231194650

Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad. 2020. Revivalistics: From the genesis of Israeli to language reclamation in Australia and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Publisher’s website.

诸葛漫 (=Ghil’ad Zuckermann). 2021. 多源造词研究 (A Study of Multisourced Neologization). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. Publisher’s website.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

[Instrumental tapping] [00:05] [Singing] [00:47]

JMc: That was Hazel Cooyou Walgar singing a song in Baiyoongoo. [00:51] The title of the song translates into English as ‘My Country’. [00:56] Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to [00:59] the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, [01:02] online at hiphilangsci.net. [01:05] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [01:10] Today we’re joined by Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, who’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. [01:18] Among other things, Ghil‘ad is an expert on language revival and reclamation, [01:23] a field that he calls ‘revivalistics’. [01:27] In 2020, he published a monograph treating this topic with Oxford University Press under the title [01:34] Revivalistics: From the genesis of Israeli to language reclamation in Australia and beyond. [01:41] So, Ghil‘ad, what is revivalistics? [01:44] Or rather, what does it mean to revive a language? [01:49]

GZ: Revivalistics is a new, comparative, global, transdisciplinary field of inquiry [01:59] surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration [02:05] from any angle possible [02:08] — for example, mental health, law, anthropology, [02:14] sociology, politics, colonization studies. [02:20] What is language revival? You see, language revival is on a spectrum. [02:27] The most extreme case of language revival is what I call reclamation. [02:33] Reclamation is when you have no native speakers of the language you are trying to revive. [02:40] This is in the case of a sleeping beauty like Hebrew. [02:43] Hebrew was a sleeping beauty [02:45] — meaning no native speakers — since 135 AD for 1,750 years. [02:52] Or a dreaming beauty [02:54] — so a dreaming beauty alluding to Jukurrpa, the Dreamtime or the Dreaming, [03:00] such as the Barngarla, Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula. [03:05] You had no native speakers of Barngarla for, say, 50 years, 60 years, since the 1960s. [03:13] And reclamation is a severe case because you have nobody to listen to who is a native speaker. [03:22] Now, on this spectrum, in the middle, you have what I call revitalization. [03:27] So revitalization is of a language that is severely endangered, [03:32] but it still has some elders speaking it. [03:35] For example, Adnyamathanha. [03:37] Adnya means ‘rock’ and mathanha means ‘people’, so Adnyamathanha rock people. [03:44] These are the Aboriginal people of the Flinders Ranges, [03:47] not that far from Adelaide. [03:50] And I have a friend called Robert Wilton. He’s in his 80s, and he is a native speaker of Adnyamathanha. [03:59] In the case of Adnyamathanha, [04:02] the percentage of native speakers among children is almost zero. [04:08] And of course, in order to determine whether a language is endangered, I don’t care about numbers. [04:13] I only care about percentage of children within the tribe speaking the language. [04:18] So, for example, Pitjantjatjara is alive and kicking, [04:21] even though it is only spoken by 3,500 people, [04:25] but, say, almost 100% of kids speak it. [04:29] Whereas you might have some languages in Africa with a million speakers, but they’re severely endangered [04:35] because the percentage of children speaking the language is very low. [04:40]

JMc: So is your understanding of a native speaker someone who learns language in this critical period [04:45] as it’s understood by generative linguists? [04:47]

GZ: Yes, and in fact, I would say he or she does not learn, but rather acquires automatically. [04:52] So, say, I’m a native speaker of Israeli, [04:55] you’re a native speaker of Australian English. [04:59] We both speak many other languages, but we learned them thereafter. [05:06] Now, in the kind of other side from reclamation, so we said reclamation, revitalization, and then you have reinvigoration. [05:17] Reinvigoration is when you have a relatively high percentage of kids speaking the language, but still not 100%. [05:24] The language is endangered. [05:27] Welsh, maybe Irish, still very endangered, but it’s not as bad as Adnyamathanha, definitely not as Barngarla. [05:35] So in the case of revitalization, which is kind of in the middle, and reinvigoration, [05:43] we can, for example, use a technique called master-apprentice because we have a master. [05:50] We have somebody who speaks the language natively. [05:53] This is in diametric opposition to the case of reclamation where we have no masters whatsoever. [05:58] Now, what is the master-apprentice technique? [06:01] You take a master, usually an old person who is a native speaker of the language, who, as you said, [06:06] had acquired the language automatically, say, between the age of zero and puberty, [06:13] and you ask this master to adopt, if you want, an apprentice. [06:19] An apprentice is a young person — can be a child, can be a teenager — who do not speak the language, [06:27] but they would help the master with daily tasks, shopping, etc., [06:34] and the master would speak to them only in language. [06:38] So the idea in the case of revitalization and reinvigoration [06:43] is to reintroduce the language to youngsters [06:47] who will then become native speakers or at least speakers. [06:51] In the case of reclamation, of course, we cannot use the master-apprentice technique, [06:56] but we can use other techniques. [06:59] Like I’m teaching Barngarla… Well, I’ve taught maybe hundreds of workshops in the bush [07:07] to various communities of Barngarla people, and we neologize together. [07:15] So, for example, a word for computer, gaga-bibi waribirga. [07:21] So gaga is ‘head’, bibi is ‘egg’, [07:24] so gaga-bibi is ‘brain’, it’s the egg inside the head, [07:28] and waribirga is ‘lightning’, [07:32] so it’s kind of a lightning or electric brain. [07:35] So lightning or electric brain, a little bit like Chinese, 电脑 (diànnǎo). [07:42] The Māori, te reo Māori, the language Māori, rorohiko, did the same thing. [07:48] You might ask yourself, let’s forget about Chinese, let’s forget about Māori or Kaurna. [07:54] I mean, you ask Barngarla people, [07:57] ‘Okay, how would you like to say “computer”?’ [07:59] And it might well be the case that they will come up with ‘brain’ and ‘lightning’ [08:03] because I guess there are many other possibilities, but it’s a good one. [08:09] So in the case of rorohiko in Māori, I would have to research whether there was somebody [08:16] who was involved in their neologization who had been exposed to Chinese. [08:22] Now, if we talk about Barngarla, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann, [08:26] the German Lutheran missionary, [08:30] who arrived in Australia in 1838, [08:35] he knew five languages, [08:38] which, of course as a revivalist, I must be fluent in, [08:42] because if I’m not, then I cannot analyse his dictionary properly. [08:46] And here you have a historical linguistic angle of revivalistics. [08:52] He knew German, of course. It was his mame-loshen or Muttersprache, [08:58] the mother language, native language. [09:01] He knew Latin, he knew Greek, he knew Hebrew, and he knew English. [09:11] These five languages are reflected [09:15] within his 1844 dictionary of the Barngarla language. [09:20] For example, as a German, he did not have the ‘r’ sound as phonemic, [09:28] in the sense that in German you either say [‘hambuɾk] or [‘hambuək]; [09:34] it’s not the case that if you say [r] and then [ʁ] [09:37] it means something different. [09:40] But in Barngarla, /r/ and /ɹ/ are phonemic, [09:42] so of course he might have well failed to notice the difference between /r/ and /ɹ/. [09:51] Intriguingly, there is a language near Adelaide called Ngarrindjeri. [09:58] In Ngarrindjeri, which is for example in Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Murray Bridge, [10:06] you did have two phonemes: one is /r/ and one is /ɹ/. [10:12] But because of emblematicity, what happens today, [10:16] and I know some Ngarrindjeri people, [10:19] they forgot about their /ɹ/ phoneme, [10:21] and they pronounce everything with /r/ [10:25] in order to other Ngarrindjeri from the English, [10:29] and therefore they say ‘Ngarrindjeri’ with a /r/. [10:34] Which is funny because when I say ‘Nga[r]indje[ɹ]i,’ [10:36] which is the original pronunciation, [10:38] they would correct me and say, [10:39] ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s Ngarrindje[r]i. There is no /ɹ/; it’s /r/.’ [10:43] So this is kind of emblematicity, [10:45] which is a phenomenon that revivalistics would analyse [10:51] and look at, you know, what is language revival. [10:54] Are you trying to reclaim the language as it used to be? [10:59] Of course you might, but you will never get there. [11:03] We will not be able to reclaim a language as it used to be. [11:07] It’s impossible. [11:08]

JMc: So it’s not the same thing. And the sources that you’re using for language reclamation, [11:12] so you mentioned an 1844 dictionary, but is that it? Like, are there texts? [11:17] Because I’m sure that there would be all sorts of aspects of a language [11:22] that Schürmann would have simply not recorded. [11:25] So how do you fill in all these gaps if your only source is this 1844 dictionary [11:29] written by a German who wasn’t even a native speaker himself? [11:32]

GZ: It’s a wonderful question, and let me surprise you. [11:36] There was a language called Nhawoo. Nhawoo, I write it N-H-A-W-O-O, Nhawoo, [11:44] because the first ‘n’ is with your tongue outside, so it’s kind of interdental, ‘Nhawoo.’ [11:52] But you might find it also as N-A-U-O. [11:56] Nhawoo only has three lexical items remaining, as far as I know. [12:05] So the first one is gardo. Gárdoo means ‘Aboriginal person’. [12:11] The second one is yánmoora. Yánmoora in Nhawoo means ‘white fellow.’ [12:18] And the third one is máldhabi. Máldhabi means ‘devil’. [12:27] Now, you’ll be shocked, but recently they published a dictionary with hundreds of words. [12:34] Now, how did they do it? [12:38] They replicated words from Barngarla, which is a related language, [12:45] from Wirangu, a related language. [12:49] They kind of reconstructed some of the grammatical aspects, [12:54] looking at Barngarla, etc. [12:57] So even with three words, they’re now trying to reclaim their sleeping or their dreaming beauty. [13:06] A fortiori in the case of Barngarla, where I actually managed to extract 3,500 words from Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s dictionary. [13:19] Now, let me just give you some details about the Old Testament. [13:23] In the Old Testament, you had 8,000 distinct words, types. [13:29]

JMc: So this is the Hebrew Old Testament, you mean? [13:31]

GZ: Yes, the Hebrew Bible. [13:33] Out of which 2,000 were hapax legomena, appearing only once, [13:40] which practically means that we are kind of on shaky grounds when it comes to the meaning of a word appearing only once. [13:48] So simplistically speaking, the Hebrew Bible is 6,000 words. [13:55] Now, Barngarla, 3,500 words. [13:59] In order to read a newspaper in Mandarin or Modern Standard Chinese, [14:05] you need something like 3,700 words. [14:08] So we are at the level of a language being alive and kicking. [14:13] Of course, with 3,500 words, you can make up many more words, just like combinations, etc. [14:20] And this is with no borrowings in the sense of phonetic adaptation of English words, [14:27] like say in some, as you know, in some Aboriginal languages, ‘horse’ would be /’wudʒi/ [14:32] because there is no /h/, there is no /s/, so ‘horse’ would be pronounced as /’wudʒi/, [14:37] or, say, ‘swamp’ would be pronounced as /tu’wumba/, [14:43] or /’tuwumba/ as in the town near Brisbane, you know, swamp, Toowoomba. [14:48] So you can also do that, but without that, we already have 3,500 words. [14:53] Now, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann also wrote a grammar. [14:58] His grammar is not, say, kind of a Chomskyan modern grammar, [15:03] but we actually managed to extract a very big grammar out of it. [15:10] So I would argue that I have all the material needed for a reclamation in the case of Barngarla. [15:19] Of course, I’m not talking about, you know, intonation, in the prosody, in the prosody sense of, you know… Of course we’re not talking about that. [15:30] We do not have videos, you know, for example, gestures are extremely important. [15:36]

JMc: So I guess there is a much deeper question about what even is a language. [15:41] So, I mean, you’ve been talking mostly about structural features, so like words in particular that you might have in a dictionary, grammar, [15:49] and then you extended that to prosody and other features of phonology. [15:54] But what about the deep cultural aspects of a language? [15:57] So what the words actually mean [15:59] and the broader cultural context in which they’re embedded. [16:02] So, I mean, the descendants of Ashkenazi Jews living in Israel today [16:05] would be culturally quite different from people at the court of King David, [16:10] and in the same way, there’s perhaps a big difference in culture that’s within certain parts of Aboriginal Australia from before the British invasion, if I can put it that way, to the present day. [16:22] So what exactly is it that you’re reclaiming or reviving in this broader cultural context? [16:27]

GZ: That’s a very perspicacious point, because even if we want to go back to the original Weltanschauung, which is very beautifully reflected in language, [16:43] there have been so many changes post-colonization in the case of Australia that might bar us from doing it. [16:51] So, for example, in the case of Barngarla, [16:54] if I speak with you and I want to say ‘we’, of course, I need to use the dual. [16:59] We have a dual in Barngarla as opposed to English. [17:03] In English, we don’t care if ‘we’ it’s two people or three people. It’s still W-E ‘we’. [17:08] In Barngarla, if you are my brother’s son and I want to say ‘we two’, [17:16] I would say ngarrrinyi. [17:19] If you are my sister’s son and I want to say ‘we two’, I cannot say ngarrrinyi. I have to say ngadlaga. [17:28] Languages differ not in what they can say, but, as we know, in what they must say. [17:34] You must say in Old Barngarla ngadlaga if you are my sister’s son, [17:42] and we must say ngarrrinyi if you are my brother’s son. [17:46] So, it’s kind of a matrilineal as opposed to patrilineal dual. [17:51] Now, in English, not only do you not have a dual, [17:54] nobody could care less if you are related to each other through the sister or through the brother. [17:59] Now, why is it important? [18:01] Because in ancient times, I guess it might have meant some kind of taboos when it comes to marriage, weddings. [18:09] Nowadays, of course, we are in different times, so we kind of lost it, [18:15] and by losing the language, we actually lose a lot of our cultural autonomy, spirituality. [18:26] We lose a lot about intellectual sovereignty. [18:30] We lose a lot of our soul, metaphorically speaking. [18:34] And by reconnecting with language, [18:36] of course, we are not going to revive all the cultural traits that used to be, but it gives some kind of pride. [18:47] I think that every nationalist movement or every national movement, for example, in the case of Zionism, [18:55] strives for ancientness. [19:00] You wanted, [19:01] if you were Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Israeli or of the Hebrew revival, [19:07] you wanted to be as ancient as possible. [19:10] Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s dream was to speak like a biblical Jew, [19:17] and therefore he envied the Arabs [19:19] with the /ħa/, with the /qa/, with the /ʔa/, with the /tˤa/. [19:22] My name, Ghil‘ad [gil’ʕad], was like that pronounced in Hebrew. Nowadays, everybody pronounces it /gi’lad/, [19:28] a little bit like Julia Gillard, you know, /gi’lad/. [19:32] And some Aussies write it with an ‘r’, Gilad, as in ‘Gilard.’ [19:38] Look, this was his dream, but of course, [19:42] you cannot ignore your most recent heritage. [19:48] In the case of Jews coming to Israel [19:51] after the Holocaust or before the Holocaust in the fin de siècle, it was Yiddish. [19:58] Even though Eliezer Ben-Yehuda hated Yiddish, his mame-loshen, his mother tongue, [20:03] he could not avoid its shackles. [20:07] So this kind of cultural renewal has its limits and we should not lament it. [20:17] We should embrace the new hybridic language, [20:21] which… we should not chastise the new speakers. [20:27] We should never say, ‘Give us authenticity or give us death’, [20:31] because if we say that, as some elders in the Tiwi Island near Darwin said, [20:39] if you say that to the young people, ‘Give us authenticity or give us death’, [20:43] you will end up with death. [20:46] You will end up with the young people resorting to the colonizer’s language, [20:50] namely English, or Australian, or Strine, [20:54] rather than speaking kind of a different or a hybridic form of Tiwi. [20:59] I have a friend, Tīmoti Kāretu, in Aotearoa. [21:03] Tīmoti is a prescriptivist, a purist, [21:07] and he doesn’t like it when you make mistakes in te reo Māori, [21:10] the language Māori. [21:12] But of course, it’s counterproductive [21:13] because some people would see him and walk to the other side of the pavement, [21:19] not wanting to talk to him because they are afraid. [21:23] It can be counterproductive. [21:24] So I would embrace, champion hybridity. [21:29]

JMc: But do you think there’s a danger in this idea of revitalization altogether [21:34] that you could devalue current ways [21:37] that the Jewish people or Aboriginal people in Australia or Māori people [21:41] actually speak now? [21:43]

GZ: Absolutely. So David Ben-Gurion, [21:45] who was the first Prime Minister of Israel in 1948, [21:49] but also he was the leader of the Yishuv before the establishment of Israel. [21:56] He listened to Różka Korczak. [21:59] She was a Holocaust survivor. [22:00] This is the beginning of 1945, the end of 1944. [22:05] She spoke in the Histadrut, [22:08] which is an organization in Israel which used to be very important, [22:12] and she spoke in Yiddish, her mame-loshen, her mother tongue. [22:16] And David Ben-Gurion, I cannot forget it. [22:19] I mean, of course, I was not there. I was born in 1971. [22:21] I cannot forget how horrible it was when I read about it first time. [22:27] He said, זה עתה דיברה פה חברה בשפה זרה וצורמת…’ [22:35]‘ (ze atá dibrá po khaverá besafá zará vetsorémet…) ‘We have just heard a comrade [22:38] speaking in a language that is foreign and cacophonous’, [22:45] referring to the Jewish language called Yiddish, which is Judeo-German. [22:51] This is shocking in today’s terms. [22:56] It’s the irony of history. [22:59] Zionism tried to kill Yiddish [23:02] because Yiddish represented the diasporic, persecuted. [23:08] And, of course, Zionism is based on two negations. [23:13] One is the negation of the diaspora, and the other is the negation of religion. [23:17] And you can see the residues of this in today’s Israel. [23:21] It’s fascinating and multifaceted. [23:24] But the irony of history, [23:27] Zionism wanted to cancel Yiddish, but Yiddish survives beneath Israeli. [23:33] So this self-loathing definitely played a part, but it did not succeed. [23:42] And, of course, these days, which is, what, 75 years after the establishment of Israel, [23:49] if we talk about Israeli now, [23:51] I think it’s time to say, ‘Okay, we self-loathed Yiddish.’ [23:56] But actually, Yiddish is a fascinating language. [23:59] So I think that if we get rid of this imprisoning purism prism, [24:08] if you allow me an alliteration, [24:11] and if we kind of get into a more realistic Weltanschauung, you know, worldview, [24:20] then we end up empowering people who have lost everything in their lives. [24:27]

JMc: And what is the ultimate aim? [24:29] I mean, you mentioned getting kids to acquire the language [24:32] so that they become native speakers. [24:34] But is there also an institutional element of expanding the domains in which the language is used? [24:40] Because if kids were just speaking at home, like in the family, [24:43] that is a relatively limited domain. [24:46] Like if you look at the example of Israel again, [24:48] Modern Hebrew or Israeli is a language that is used in all domains of life, [24:52] so in education, the government, business, and so on. [24:57]

GZ: It’s a wonderful point, and the answer is, [25:01] what do the custodians want? [25:07] The custodians are the language owners. [25:10] We are facilitators. [25:14] We are revivalists, but the custodians are at the wheel. [25:20] They can decide to go the full monty, [25:22] meaning to have their grandchildren native speakers of the Neo-Barngarla, [25:28] or the Neo-Baiyungu, or the neo-language. [25:31] They can also decide, ‘We don’t care about native speech. [25:37] We want a post-vernacular phase’, just like Yiddish in America. [25:45] Most Jews in America would know the word shlep, [25:48] like to take one thing from one place to another, or to take yourself. [25:54] Jews in America would know this, [25:55] but they would not know how to speak Yiddish. [25:58] I’m not talking about the ultra-Orthodox of New York, [26:00] because of course they do speak Yiddish natively, [26:03] but I’m talking about the secular Jews. [26:05] It’s post-vernacular, as my friend Jeffrey Shandler coined, post-vernacular. [26:10] Or, te reo Māori in New Zealand is post-vernacular. [26:13] Every Māori knows whakapapa, ‘heritage’. [26:17] Every Māori knows iwi, which is a canoe or a tribe. [26:23] Every Māori knows whānau. [26:25] Whānau is like the family, or the khamula, the… [26:30] Every Māori would know the Te Taura Whiri, the Māori Language Commission, [26:34] which is like a bundled rope. [26:37] But how many Māori, [26:40] what is the percentage of Māori kids speaking Māori, or speaking Māori natively? [26:45] Very low percentage. It’s a severely endangered language. [26:49] So coming back to the Aboriginal custodians, they can say, ‘Look, we want to know 100 words. [26:56] We don’t need more than that.’ [26:58] They can also say, ‘You know what we want? [27:00] We want our language to be the official language of the region.’ [27:07] Currently in New Zealand you have two official languages, [27:10] Te Reo Māori, the language Māori, [27:12] and, surprise, the New Zealand Sign Language. [27:17] English is not de jure, it’s de facto. [27:22] Australia has no official languages. [27:25] Singapore has four, you know: Mandarin, English, Malay, and Tamil. [27:31] Australia has zero. [27:33] I would argue that Australia must have 401, approximately, official languages, [27:41] one Australian sign language, and 400 Aboriginal languages. [27:45] Of course, English is de facto, but it doesn’t need to be de jure. [27:51] So, Barngarla should be the official language of Galinyala. [27:56] Now, what is Galinyala? Port Lincoln. [27:59] How many people know that Galinyala is Port Lincoln? [28:02] Well, more and more so, [28:03] because now we’ve managed to convince the council, etc., to put signs. [28:10] And there is a sign, ‘Galinyala’. [28:14] And now more and more people know that ‘Galinyala’ means ‘Port Lincoln’. [28:17] But until recently, nobody knew, except us, you know, including Aboriginal people, they didn’t know. [28:24] And Goordnada is Port Augusta. [28:27] So we also need not only to officialize the language, [28:31] but also to change the langscape, the linguistic landscape. [28:35] Don’t forget that in Aboriginal spirituality, there is a trinity: [28:39] not il Padre, il Figlio, e lo Spirito Santo, not that trinity, [28:43] but the land, the language, and the people. [28:49] The land does not belong to the people. Rather, the people belong to the land. [28:57] The language belongs to the land. [28:59] So if you speak to a kangaroo in Galinyala, Port Lincoln, [29:02] you need to speak Barngarla. [29:05] You cannot speak Kaurna. [29:07] The kangaroo, according to that spirituality, would not understand you. [29:12] It would understand Barngarla, because both belong to the land. [29:17]

JMc: Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [29:19]

GZ: Oh, it’s a pleasure, James. [29:21] It’s always wonderful to talk to you, and keep up the good work. [29:24]

JMc: Yeah, and thanks for coming all the way to Hamburg. [29:27]

GZ: It’s a pleasure. Meine Großmutter ist in Hamburg geboren. [29:30] My grandmother was born in Hamburg, [29:32] and it’s actually the first time in which I see this beautiful city. [29:37]

[Instrumental tapping] [29:40] [Singing]