IDIL 2022–2032: Voices of Country Action Plan — An LDaCA Discussion Paper

by Rosanna Smith, Simon Musgrave, Robert McLellan and Ben Foley

International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032

The world’s billions of people use thousands of languages in myriads of ways, through communication by speech, sign, text and song (Evans, 2022). Diversity of language is critical for conveying the world’s knowledges and expressing the range of human experiences. Australia is in an area of great language diversity, with hundreds of languages on this continent.

Languages require action to remain in use. The United Nations General Assembly has declared the period between 2022 and 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL). The aim of IDIL is to draw global attention to the critical status of Indigenous languages worldwide and encourage action for their revitalisation, promotion and ongoing use.

The International Decade aims to achieve four main outcomes:

1. Learn, teach, and transmit: Empower Indigenous Peoples to learn, teach and transmit their languages to the present and future generations.
2. Establish as global priority and foster commitment: Establish the usage, preservation, revitalisation and promotion of Indigenous languages as a global priority for societal development, peacebuilding and reconciliation by 2030.
3. Ensure legal recognition: Ensure Indigenous languages are recognised by Member States within their legal systems and legislation, which, in turn, are supported with comprehensive language-related laws and policy frameworks, and are backed by allocated financial, institutional and human resources.
4. Enhance the functional usage: Develop an enabling environment to enhance the functional usage of Indigenous languages in socio-cultural, economic, environmental, legal and political domains.

Voices of Country: Australia’s National Action Plan for IDIL

International Decade of Indigenous Languages Logo
Image Source: International Decade of Indigenous Languages Directions Group

The Australian Government has partnered with the IDIL Directions Group to produce the Voices of Country Action Plan. The Action Plan provides a framework to guide Australia’s participation in the International Decade, focusing in particular on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community needs, and is a call to action for all stakeholders. The plan was launched at the PULiiMA Indigenous Languages and Technology Conference in Garamilla/Darwin in August 2023.

Voices of Country Themes

Voices of Country is guided by five inter-connected themes, represented as a native wattle tree, itself a source of food, medicine and tools, with language, culture and traditional knowledges as its foundation.
Image Source: Gilimbaa with cultural elements created by David Williams (Wakka Wakka)

Voices of Country is framed through five interconnected themes:

1. Stop the Loss: Securing the future and continuance of Australia’s first languages.
2. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities are Centre: Over the Decade, our voices, and those of our Elders, will ensure that community leadership and priorities are at the centre. Our voices will come through – everything we do will be by community, for community. This will give us stronger and safer communities.
3. Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer: Restore intergenerational traditional language and cultural transmission.
4. Caring for Country: Everyone has the opportunity to practise their language and culture on Country.
5. Truth-telling and Celebration: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples speak their language with integrity and pride. Wider Australia shares this pride, respecting and celebrating Australia’s first languages and all that they encompass.

LDaCA’s contribution

A sub-part of Theme 2 in the Action Plan has the title ‘Support communities to build and be the custodians of language resources and materials’. Making language resources and materials sustainable and accessible is central to the work of LDaCA. This includes working in collaboration with communities, and providing them with the tools and support they need to be effective custodians of their language materials.

The sub-theme has six components (Voices of Country p34):

1. Embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practices and knowledge systems into linguistic methodologies.
2. Develop resources that document and record languages, such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, thesauri, grammar and orthography documents.
3. Record and digitise written and oral language collections, resources and materials.
4. Provide communities with the support, training and infrastructure they require to build language resources and collections.
5. Support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to access and repurpose historical language materials.
6. Repatriate language materials and cultural knowledge to community ownership and control.

We will give a brief summary of how LDaCA is contributing to each of these areas of activity, first covering components two to six and then returning to show how all of those activities contribute to the first component. In this summary, we will refer occasionally to the FAIR and CARE ethical research principles which are core to our work. The FAIR principles have been developed as a foundation for good, scholarly ways of finding and using data, providing key guideposts (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for transparent, reproducible, and reusable language research. Further key principles for advancing Indigenous innovation and self-determination, CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics), guide ethical work with Indigenous language collections. The concluding discussion will also detail the connection between the principles, especially the CARE principles, and LDaCA’s work supporting the Voices of Country Action Plan.

Component 2: Develop resources that document and record languages

LDaCA contributes to work under component two by providing recommendations for good practice in developing sustainable resources. It is important to avoid having data locked into bespoke individual solutions which may be difficult to maintain. Instead, we advocate using data formats that can be supported into the future and which can be the basis for various tools. Although LDaCA can have only a limited role in developing resources, such as dictionaries or text collections, we can provide advice about key aspects of data handling, assist with designing backup strategies, and work with people to develop long-term strategies for appropriate access to language resources.

Component 3: Record and digitise written and oral language materials

Similarly to component two, we have an indirect role in activity related to component three. We support recording and digitisation through our collaborative partnerships with the Nyingarn project and with PARADISEC. Nyingarn is a platform for making manuscript and typescript sources for Indigenous languages available as searchable digital objects, while PARADISEC has extensive experience in digitising language materials. Increasingly, LDaCA and these partners share a single technological ecosystem, leading to greater alignment in formats and description for digital versions of historical materials, which, in turn, increases the sustainability and usability of the materials.

Component 4: Provide communities with support, training and infrastructure to build language resources

Contributing to component four, LDaCA is working with various Indigenous groups and organisations to help manage the language resources and collections they hold. An example is our partnership with the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, which holds an important archive of physical and digital works in, and about, Indigenous languages. The collection is managed by the Batchelor Institute Library and has strong connections with language projects through the Institute’s Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics (CALL).

The CALL Collection includes text, audio and video resources that have been contributed over at least 30 years by students and staff of the Batchelor Institute, as well as by teachers, linguists and language workers external to the institute. We are working with the Batchelor Institute to:

• backup and reformat item record information
• copy metadata from an ageing database into contemporary metadata standard format
• embed cultural protocols to ensure long-term and appropriate access to this significant collection.

We are also working on training programs, designed with First Nations people, which will help make resources accessible to non-academic users of language data.

Component 5: Support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to access and repurpose historical language materials

Component five aligns closely with the A and the R in the FAIR principles: Accessibility and Reusability. In order for data to meet these FAIR criteria, it must be well-described, but in many cases, existing collections of Indigenous data are not as well-described as they might be, and even when they are considered to be well-described, the description is often based on non-Indigenous knowledge.

LDaCA is contributing to component five of the sub-theme by developing methods to make it easier to enrich existing descriptions of data, with the aim of moving towards Indigenous knowledges as the basis for the description of Indigenous data. We have carried out a pilot project with The University of Queensland libraries, in which records from the library system have been enriched with additional annotations based on Indigenous knowledges of the collection items. The results of this project can be seen in a dedicated data portal.

Component 6: Repatriate language materials and cultural knowledge to community ownership and control

The A in the CARE principles stands for Authority to control. LDaCA’s approach to sustainable data includes a commitment to storing explicit licences with data, detailing in plain text who can access data and what the data can be used for. In line with component six, the communities and people who are the source of Indigenous data have the authority to make decisions about such matters: they decide who can access data and what users can do with the data.

LDaCA has developed policies and technical solutions for implementing such access controls that make ongoing administration of access as straightforward as possible. We are sharing ideas and solutions with our colleagues in the Indigenous stream of the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons. The solutions that we are using for Indigenous data can also apply to other human-sourced data. As Levi-Craig Murray is fond of saying: “What’s good for mob, is good for everyone”.

Component 1: Embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practices and knowledge systems into linguistic methodologies

As stated above, we see all of the activities from components two to six as contributing to the aim of embedding Indigenous knowledges and cultural practices into our methodologies. When working with language material, LDaCA is guided by FAIR and CARE principles (Carroll et al. 2020; Carroll et al. 2021; Wilkinson et al. 2016). The FAIR principles provide guidance on ensuring that data will be useful in the future, though they do this from a Western scientific perspective. The CARE principles extend the FAIR data management principles and we hope that our commitment to these principles assists us in contributing to the goals of the Voices of Country plan:

• Making data more sustainable and more informed by Indigenous knowledges helps ensure that Indigenous communities benefit from the data.
• Providing accessible solutions for access management contributes to First Nations people’s authority to control Indigenous data.
• Supporting Indigenous communities in developing data capabilities helps to build positive relationships and show responsibility in our work with Indigenous Peoples.
• Basing all of our work on ethical principles respects the rights and well-being of Indigenous Peoples.

We see all of our activities as both being guided by the CARE principles, and as contributing to the overall aim of embedding Indigenous knowledges and cultural practices into our methodologies. Indigenous control of access to data, Indigenous perspectives made part of the description of data, and using Indigenous perspectives to make data more accessible to communities are all part of this endeavour.

Further reading and references

2022 - 2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages. 2022 - 2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages. https://idil2022-2032.org/. (3 October, 2023a).

International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022 – 2032 | United Nations For Indigenous Peoples. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/indigenous-languages.html. (3 October, 2023b).

International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032 | Office for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/indigenous-arts-and-languages/international-decade-indigenous-languages/international-decade-indigenous-languages-2022-2032. (3 October, 2023c).

Voices of Country: Australia’s National Action Plan for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages | Office for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/indigenous-arts-and-languages/international-decade-indigenous-languages/voices-country-australias-national-action-plan-international-decade-indigenous-languages. (3 October, 2023d).

Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, Jarita Holbrook, Raymond Lovett, Simeon Materechera, Mark Parsons, et al. 2020. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal 19. 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043.

Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Edit Herczog, Maui Hudson, Keith Russell & Shelley Stall. 2021. Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures. Scientific Data. Nature Publishing Group 8(1). 108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00892-0.

Evans, Nicholas. 2022. Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us (2nd ed.). Wiley. ISBN: 978-1-119-75877-8

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data 3(1). 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

Thanks to Teresa Chan and Harriet Sheppard who provided valuable feedback on this piece.