How preserving First Nations languages forms a key part of preserving culture

This weekend The Age will launch an important new series of stories about Truth Telling.

The series coincides with the Victorian government’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission – Australia’s first truth-telling body – which has been set up to share and record stories about the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Victorians. Our series seeks to understand what happened, and how Indigenous peoples survived to tell their own stories, and to forge their own future on a path towards the nation’s first Treaty.

One of the areas that will be covered is Indigenous language and why it is important. In a series of audio clips and videos you can learn words that are important to Indigenous culture such as Iuk, the word for eel, and Kirrup, the word for friend.

With many Indigenous languages already lost or dormant as a result of colonisation, the importance of preserving language, and for all Australians to learn it, has come into sharp focus.

Today on Please Explain, Indigenous affairs journalist Jack Latimore joins Nathanael Cooper to discuss the importance of language.

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