Today's ABC News reports that Desert Channels Queensland (DCQ) of Australia is to produce 14 pictorial dictionaries to help preserve Aboriginal languages in part of the State. The report quotes a DCQ spokesperson saying that the dictionaries will help to revive the languages, which are spoken by only a small number of people, and that they should help to ensure that the languages won't die out.
This seems to me highly questionable. A dictionary will certainly help people to understand the language and will assist in translation, but I can't help but feel that it takes more than that to prevent the extinction of a little-spoken language, never mind encourage more people to speak it. A language dies because it no longer needs to be spoken, either because another more-widely spoken language supplants it, or because the speakers of the language are too small a group for it to survive naturally. A dictionary, however well produced and widely distributed, is unlikely to prevent either of these occurrences.
However, we wish DCQ luck in their endeavour, but we would point them in the direction of our post from December 2005 about attempts to revive the Irish language, which outlines the criteria for a language to be successful and sustainable.
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