An Australian Aboriginal community with only 8 fluent speakers left has launched a mobile phone game to help reconnect their youth with the tongue of their ancestors.
The game allows you to help preserve a wetland nature reserve where the community lives, with almost 100 words and phrases in the Nyiyaparli language.
Numbering around 400 community members, the Nyiyaparli hail from a remote region of northwest Australia in an area called the Pilbara. There, as happened in so many other lands across the Commonwealth, indigenous children were placed in English-language institutions and the connection with their lingual heritage was severed.
Once widely spoken across the Pilbara, the pressure of assimilation into European culture and the spread of larger neighboring Aboriginal languages has proven almost fatal to Nyiyaparli.
The Karlka Nyiyaparli Aboriginal Corporation (KNAC) which manages the common welfare of the community launched the Nyiyaparli Living Language Project in 2022 in an attempt to save their dying language. But the KNAC didn’t look to the past for inspiration, rather, they leveraged the present.
“The cultural working group decided that you’re never going to take phones away from kids,” said the project’s executive producer Simon Te Brinke. “Why not give them something that can help them learn?”
Despite their remote location and rich indigenous heritage, Nyiyaparli children seem to be as immersed in games like Minecraft and Fortnite as anyone else. Te Brinke decided to try and utilize that existing interest: to go with the flow, rather than try to convince them to put their phones down.
The game puts you into the role of a junior ranger in the Fortescue Marsh Nature Reserve which the community manages. The game contains 90 Nyiyaparli words, spoken aloud by community elders who know how.
“Players have to collect cultural objects as they navigate their way through each of the locations,” Mr. Te Brinke told ABC News. “As they collect, they hear sounds and words actually spoken in Nyiyaparli. So it’s reinforcing the language.”
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The game has won several awards that included large cash prices which will undoubtedly help the project expand its efforts. A digital language center is in the works, with the aim being to build on the foundations established by the phone game.
Apps and games are being used to help revive other Aboriginal languages too. A storybook app that teaches science concepts was designed by a man from the Goldfields region of northern Australia, who’s one of only 3 people who speak Ngalia, a dialect of a more widely spoken Mantjiltjintjarra, that’s featured in the application.
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Kabo Muir worked with his brother Talbot, another speaker, to compile a dictionary of Ngalia words, which benefits from the fact that it’s similar to the surrounding tongues in the region. The next step to preserving it, he says, is innovation.
The Mamutjitji Story app centers around a native insect species called an antlion, and how it adapts to a changing world.
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