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A
This episode is brought to you by Marshalls, where you never have to compromise between quality and price. The buyers of Marshalls hustle hard working to bring you great deals on brand name and designer pieces because Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff. Visit a Marshalls store near you or shop online@marshalls.com when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated and it just feels so good. Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car, suddenly it seems quite practical. The all new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats. It only feels extravagant.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Alex Gray and I'm a research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney in Australia. This university stands on what has long been unceded land of the gutty people. So I'll just acknowledge in the way that we do often these days in Australia where we are Nini Nalwar, Gun Murray Bajiri, Gadi Niruda and I'd really like to thank Ngarigo woman Professor Jackie Troy, who in her professional work as a linguist is an expert on the Sydney language and has helped develop that particular acknowledgement. My guest today is Zoe Avery, a Worrimi woman and a research officer at the Centre for Australian Languages. That centre is part of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which we'll call iatsis. Zoe, welcome to the show.
- [02:23]
B
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and talk about my work that I'm doing at iatsis.
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A
Yes. So in this work at iatsis, you're one of the people involved in preparing the upcoming National Indigenous Languages Survey. This will be the fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey in Australia. The first one came out now over 20 years ago in 2005. This time around, you and your team have made some really important changes to the survey design through the co design process. Let's talk about that. Can you Tell us please, what is the National Indigenous Languages Survey, what's it used for and how this fourth iteration was co designed?
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B
Yeah, so the National Indigenous Languages Survey, or I'll be calling it nils, throughout the podcast, they're used to report the status and situation of indigenous languages in Australia. As you mentioned, this is the fourth one. The first one was done all the way back in 2004 and a third, Nils was done about, so six years ago in 2019. So it's been a while. And it's kind of used to show the progress of how languages in Australia are being spoken and used and I suppose the strength of the languages, which will kind of go into a bit more detail today as well. But the data is really important because it can be used by the government to develop appropriate language revitalisation programs or understand the areas that require the most support, but it can also be used by communities, which is really important as well. And so Nils 4 has been a little bit different from the start compared to previous NILs because the government has asked us to run this survey in order to measure target 16 of closing the gap, which is that by 2031 languages. Sorry, by 2031 there's sustained increase in the number and strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages being spoken. So the scope of this project is much bigger than the past NILS and IATSIS has really prioritised Indigenous leadership in the design and will be continuing to progress prioritise Indigenous voices in the rollout and reporting of the results of the survey. So because this is a national level database and we want to make sure as many languages as possible are represented, including previously under recognized and underreported languages, including sign languages, new languages, dialects. It's really important that we have Indigenous voices prioritised throughout this entire research process. And we want to make sure that the questions that are being asked in the survey are questions that the community want answers to, whether or not to advocate to the government that these are the areas that need the most support, the most funding, or whether or not the community want that data for themselves to help develop appropriate, culturally safe programs. So what we did is we had this big CO design process this year to design the survey. We had 16 co design workshops with Indigenous language stakeholders across Australia. And this was. These workshops was facilitated by CO design specialists Yamagigu Consulting. And we had in total about 150 people participate in the CO design process. And of these 150 people, about 107 of these were Indigenous. And so these indigenous language stakeholders included elders, like language center staff members, teachers, interpreters, sign language users, language workers, government stakeholders, all sorts of different people that have a stake in indigenous languages for whatever reason. And we had eight on country workshops which were held in cities around Australia, and eight online workshops as well, which helped make it easier for people that kind of came from different places and weren't able to come to an in person workshop.
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A
Sorry, Zoe, just congratulations. That sounds like it's been a huge undertaking. So many people, so many, so many workshops. Well done.
- [07:36]
B
Yeah, it's. It has been huge. And we've had so many different people from a variety of different language contexts participate as well. So the diversity of language experiences that were kind of showcased at these workshops was immense and has had a huge impact on drafting the survey, which is obviously the whole point of the workshops. But yeah, it's. We took all the insights from the CO design workshops, we analyzed them, thematically, coded everything and started incorporating everything into the survey. And then we went back to the people who participated in the co design workshops and held these validation workshops so we could show them the draft of the survey, show them how we had planned on incorporating all of their insights. You know, that we weren't just doing it for the sake of ticking a box to say, yes, we've had Indigenous engagement, but we were actually really wanting to have indigenous import from the start and right until the end of the project. And we had really good feedback from the validation workshops. And it is you know, not just a massive task running these workshops, but also making sure that everybody's listened to and sometimes they were kind of contrasting views about how things should be done. And yeah, we wanted to make sure that we had as much of a balance as possible. We also consulted with the Languages Policy Partnership, which are kind of key workers in indigenous languages policy and advocacy and they're kind of leaders in the closing the gap target 16 that I was just talking about. So their input and advice has been really important to us, as has consultations with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the MY Kwaiu Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing. So, yeah, there's been a lot of input and we're really excited that we're at the point now where we're finishing the survey, dotting all the I's, crossing all the T's, and getting ready to start rollout soon.
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A
Yeah, well, I mean, one would hope, good input, good output, you know, such a huge process of designing it. You should get really well targeted, really informative, useful results. And you've mentioned a few things There that I'll just explain for listeners, because not all our listeners will be familiar with the Australian context. It's coming through that there's enormous diversity of indigenous peoples and languages in Australia. So to explain a little bit, because we won't go into this in much detail, in this interview, Zoe's mentioned new languages. So like contact languages, Aboriginal Englishes, creoles, like Yumpla Toc, which comes from the place called the Torres Strait. If you're not familiar with Australia, that area is between Australia, the Australian mainland and Papua New guinea in the northeast. And then there's an enormous diversity of what are sometimes called traditional languages across Australia and both the mainland and the Tiwi Islands as well. So we have a lot of Aboriginal language diversity and then in addition, Torres Strait Islander language, and then in addition, new or contact varieties.
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B
And sign languages as well.
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A
Of course. Yes, and sign languages. Thank you, Zoe. And then you've mentioned target 16. So we have in Australia a policy framework for closing the gap. For the first time ever, the current closing the gap framework includes a target on language strength. But as the survey goes into, language strength can be measured in different ways. So how have you chosen to ask about language strength in this survey? And why have you chosen these ways of asking?
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B
Yeah, so along with kind of target 16 of closing the gap, there's an outcome 16, which is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and languages are strong supported and flourishing. So it's important for us in the survey to kind of address those kind of buzzwords, strong supported and flourishing. But it is very clear from co design that the widely used measures of language strength don't necessarily always apply to Australian indigenous languages. So these kind of widely used and recognised measures of how many speakers of a language are there and is the language still being learned by children as a first language? These are not the only ways of measuring language strength. And we really wanted to make sure that we kind of redefined language strength in the survey based off indigenous worldviews. So language is independent with things like community, identity, country ceremony and self determination. How do we incorporate that into the survey? So we're still going to be asking questions like how many speakers of the language are there? What age are the people who are speaking the language? But we're also going to be asking questions on how many people understand the language, because people may not be able to speak a language due to disability, cultural protocol reasons or due to revitalization, for example, but they can still understand the language and that can still be an indication of language strength. We're also asking questions about how and where it's used. So do people use the language while practising cultural activities in ceremony, in storytelling, in writing, just to name a few. We know that indigenous languages are so strongly entangled with culture and country and it's difficult to measure the strength of culture and country. But we can acknowledge the interdependencies of language, culture and country. And by asking these kinds of questions we can get some culturally appropriate and community led ways of defining language strength.
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A
And that's just going to be so useful for then the raft of policies that one hopes will follow not just the survey, but follow the target 16 and even once we get to 2031 we'll continue in the wake of supporting that revitalisation.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that another thing that we heard from CO design, but just also from indigenous people in research and advocacy, that language is such a huge part of culture and identity that by, you know, developing these programs and policies to help address language strength, all the other closing the gap targets like health and justice and education, those outcomes will all be improved as well.
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A
Yeah, I guess that's why in the policy speak language is part of one of the priority response areas for the closing the gap. And I noticed this round of the survey in particular is different from what I've seen in the earlier NILS in the way it asks questions which also appears to reflect the CO design. So for example, these questions about language strength, they start with phrase, we heard that. And then a particular kind of way of thinking about strength and then another way of thinking about strength might be presented in the next question. We also heard that, so on and so on. So is this so people trust the survey more or we conscious of phrasing the survey questions really differently compared to say the 2019 version of the survey?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. We want people to trust a survey and understand that we respect each individual response like as much as it's true. We're a government agency and we've been asked to do this to get data for closing the gap. We want language communities to also be able to use this data for their own self determination and we want to try and break down these barriers for communities and reduce the burden as much as possible. So making sure that the survey was phrased in accessible language and the questions were as consistent as possible. But yeah, we wanted to make sure that we were implementing insights from CO design but making it clear in the survey that we didn't just kind of come up with these questions out of nowhere that these were co designed with community and represent the different priorities of different language organizations, workers and communities across Australia. So we want the communities to know why we're asking these questions and also why they should answer the questions. Because ultimately that's why we're asking the survey questions, because we want people to answer the questions.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And I think that also comes through in the next part of the survey as well, which is about how languages can be better supported, which again gives a lot of sort of co designed ideas of different ways of support that people can then talk to and expand on so that what comes through in your data hopefully is really community led ideas of what government support or community support would look like rather than top down approaches. So for example, the survey asks about forms of government funding, reform to government infrastructure, access to what the survey calls spaces for languages. I really like this idea. As a sociolinguist, I really get that access to language materials through community support. The survey also mentions legislation about languages as a possible form of support. So this should encourage policymakers not to intuit or impose solutions, but rather to listen to the survey language respondents and what they say they need. What I especially noticed in this part of the survey was the question about racism affecting the strength of language, or if you like reducing racism, a way of supporting language renewal. So I don't think this question was asked in previous versions of the survey. Right. Can you tell us what Ledger team to include this one?
- [18:18]
B
Yeah. So this idea of a supported language as I measured, as I explained before, is one of the measures in outcome 16 of closing the gap and that we want policymakers to listen to what the language communities want and need in regards of support. Because, you know, in Australia there's so much language diversity, it's not a one size fit all approach. Funding was something that had that all language communities had in common, whether it was a language in revitalization. They needed funding for resources and language workers, but also languages that one could say are in maintenance. So languages considered strong languages but have a lot of speakers, they also need funding to make sure that their language isn't at risk of being lost and that it can stay a strong language. So there are other kinds of ways that a language can be supported. And if we're talking about kind of racism and discrimination as a way that a language isn't supported, it was important for us to kind of ask that question because in co design it was clear that racism and discrimination are still massively impacting language revitalisation and strengthening efforts. The unfortunate reality of the situation of Australian languages, indigenous languages, is that due to colonisation, indigenous languages have been actively suppressed and we want to make sure that respondents of the survey have the opportunity to kind of participate in this truth telling. It is an optional question. We understand it can be somewhat distressing to talk about language loss and the impacts of racism and things like that, but if respondents feel comfortable to answer this question, it does give communities the opportunity to share their stories about how their language has been impacted by racism.
- [20:46]
A
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B
Yeah, I just want to say that how awesome Palima was and to see all the different communities all there and there was so much language and love and support in the room and everyone had a story to tell about how their language was flourishing, which was so awesome to hear a flourishing language. In terms of designing a survey and asking questions about is a language flourishing is a tricky thing to unpack because in co design we kind of heard that a flourishing language can be put down to two things and that's visibility and growth of a language. And so growth of a language is something that you can understand based off the questions that we've already asked in kind of the strength of a language. How many speakers is this number more or less compared to last time, the last survey? We're also asking questions about has this number grown in case it kind of sits within the same bracket as it did in the last survey. And visibility is kind of the other factor which can be misleading sometimes as well. We're asking questions about, you know, is it being used in place names, public signage, films and media, just to name a few. But a language that is highly visible in public may be assumed to be strong, but isn't strong where it matters, so being used within families and communities. So this section is a little bit smaller because it kind of builds on the questions in previous sections. So it will be interesting to see Kind of the idea of a flourishing language. And we do have the opportunity for people to kind of expand on their responses in kind of long form answers so people can explain in their own words, in detail if they choose to kind of how they see their language as being flourishing. But yeah, for a language to be strong and flourishing it needs to be supported. And that's something that was very clear in co design and people wanting things like language legislation and funding and how these things can be used to support the language strength and to allow it to flourish. So in this section we also have kind of an opportunity for people to give us their top three language goals. So whether that's they want to increase the number of speakers or they want to improve community wellbeing, all sorts of different language goals and the opportunity for people to put their own language goals and the supports needed to achieve those language goals. So the people who would benefit from the data from this survey, the government, policymakers, communities, they can see what community has actually said are their priorities for their language and what is what they believe is the best way to address those language goals. So encouraging self determination within this survey.
- [27:56]
A
And following on from that point, I have a question in a second about sort of how you report the information and also data sovereignty, how communities have access to, in a self determined way, use this, this resource. But I just wanted to ask one more procedural question first. So you've shared a complete draft with me and we've spoken about the redrafting process. So I know the survey's close posts ready, but where I knew it. The team that Iats us up to now and now actually for those listening in the future is October 2025. Do you have an idea of when it will be released for people to answer? And who will you be asking to answer this survey? Oh Zoe, you're just on mute. What's happened?
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B
Oh, can you hear me?
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A
Yes.
- [28:37]
B
Yeah. So we've just hit a huge milestone in the research project where we're in the middle of our ethics application. So we've kind of finished drafting the survey and it's getting ready for review from the ethics committee at iatsis and hopefully if all goes well, we'll be able to start rolling out the survey in November. So yes, it's been a long time coming. This survey has been in the works for many years. I've only personally been working on this project for a little under 12 months, but there have been many people before me working towards this milestone and the people that we want to be completing this survey are what we're calling language respondents. So we don't necessarily want every indigenous person in Australia to talk about their language, but rather have one response per language by a language respondent who can kind of speak on the whole situation and status of their language and can answer questions like how many speakers speak the language. So that could be anyone from an elder to a language center staff member, maybe a teacher or staff member at a bilingual school. We're not defining language respondent and who can be a language respondent, because we understand that that's different depending on the language community. And if there are thousands of speakers of a language or very few speakers of a language, we also understand that there could be multiple people within one language group that are considered language respondents. So we're not limiting the survey to one response per language, but that's kind of the underlying goal, that we can get as many responses from the different languages in Australia, but at least one per language.
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A
That makes sense. So it's sort of at least one per speaker group or one per language community.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And then so the questions I foreshadowed just before one is about the reporting. So I noticed last time around the National Indigenous Languages Report, which came out after the last survey, so the report came out in 2020 that incorporated this really important idea of language ecologies, and that was one of the biggest innovations of that round of the survey, and that was, I think, directed at presenting the results in a way that better contextualize what support actually looks like on the ground, rather than this very abstracted notion of language being very distinct and sort of just recorded in government metrics, but embedding it in a sense of lots of dynamic language practices from people who use more than one variety. So do you want to tell us a little bit more about how you've understood that language ecology's idea? Because I see that comes up in a question as well this time around in the survey. And is it in the survey because you're hoping to use that in the framing of the report as well.
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B
Yeah. So the third NILS, which produced the National Indigenous Languages Report in 2020, contributed massively to increasing awareness of language ecologies and this idea that a language doesn't exist within a bubble, it has contextual influences, particularly when it comes to multilingualism and other languages that are incorporated into the community. So Nils4 aims to build on this work and collecting interconnected data about what languages are being used, who are they being used by, in what ways, where are they being used, at schools, at the Shops in the home. Different languages, as you mentioned before, different varieties of English. So that could be Aboriginal English, for example, or standard Australian English. It could be other indigenous, traditional, Indigenous languages. So some communities are highly multilingual and can speak many different traditional languages. Some communities may use sign languages, whether that's traditional sign languages or new sign languages like Black Auslan. And kind of knowing how communities use not only the language that the survey is being responded to about, but also other languages which will help with things like interpreting and translating services, education services, all sorts of different things that, by understanding the language ecology better and, and the environment that the language exists in. Yeah, that they can.
- [34:02]
A
That makes sense. And there you've mentioned a few things that I didn't really ask you about, but I'll just flag that there in the survey too. Translation and interpreting services, education, government services, and more broadly, workforce participation through a particular Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language. That's important data to collect. But the last sort of pressing question I have for you in this podcast is not about language work, but about data sovereignty. This is a really big issue in Australia, not just for this survey, but for all research by and with Indigenous peoples, and particularly looking at older research that was done without the involvement of Indigenous people, where there's been problems with who controls and accesses data. So what happens to the data that IATSIS collects through this survey?
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B
Yeah, so data sovereignty is obviously one of our priorities, and communities fundamentally will own the data that they input into the survey. And there will be different ways that this information will be shared or published, depending on what the respondent consents to. So part of the survey includes this consent form where they basically can decide how their data will be used and shared. And so the kind of three primary ways that the data will be used is it will be sent to the Productivity Commission for closing the gap data. As I mentioned before, we have been funded in order to produce data for closing the gap target 16 and so the data that's sent to the Productivity Commission will be all deidentified and this will be all the kind of quantitative responses. So nothing that can kind of be identified will be sent to the Productivity Commission. And this kind of data is the kind of the baseline of what people are consenting to by participating in the survey. If they don't consent to this, then they don't have to do the survey, their response won't be recorded. And then the other kind of two ways that IATSIS will be reporting on the data is through the Nils 4 report that will be published next year. And also this kind of interactive dashboard on our website. So people will be able to kind of look at some of the responses and communities will have the option of whether this data is identified or de identified. For some communities may wish to have their responses identifiable and people will be able to search through and see kind of data that relates to their communities or communities of interest or they might choose to kind of remain anonymous and de identified. And so these are going to be mostly quantitative responses as well. However, we are interested in kind of publishing these case studies in the NILS report which will be opportunities for communities to tell their language journey in their own words. And so this is a co opt sorry and OPS in co authored chapter in the NILS report that yeah, language communities can not just have data on their responses, but have the context provided the story of their language and their data. And that was something that was really evident in co design that the qualitative data needs to exist alongside the quantitative data. And that's a huge part of data sovereignty as well, like how communities want to be able to share their data. So we're really excited about this kind of co authored case study chapters in the report because community are excited about it as well. They want to be able to tell their story and in their own words. And so yeah, that's kind of how the data will be used and published. But there are other ways that the community will be able to kind of access the data from that they provide in the survey. So that's also really important to us. And we're following the kind of definitions of indigenous data sovereignty from the Myu Nairu Wingera data sovereignty principles. So making sure that, yeah, community have ownership of their data and they can have access to it, are able to interpret it, analyze it. And this has kind of been done from the beginning of co design all the way up to the reporting and that, yeah, community have control over their data at all points of this process.
- [39:26]
A
It's sounding like just such a thoughtfully managed and thoughtfully designed survey. So thanks again Zoe for talking us through it and all the best for a successful rollout. The next phase should be really interesting for you to actually get people reading and responding. And I'll be looking out for the survey results when you publish them later in 2026. Is there anything else about the survey that you'd like to tell our listeners?
- [39:52]
B
I think that we've had a really productive conversation about our survey. We're really excited to start rolling it out. We're really excited for people to look out for the results as they start to be published and shared next year. So, yeah, if anybody has any questions or would like more information, I encourage everyone to kind of check out our website and send us an email. But yeah, thank you for having me and for letting me chat about this project. It's been a huge part of my life for the past few months and excited for the rest of the world to get to experience this data which is hopefully going to have such a big impact on communities having this accurate, reliable, comprehensive national database that can be used for, yeah, major strides in indigenous languages in Australia.
- [40:56]
A
Well, we'll definitely put the iatsis website, which is iatsis.gov au in the show notes and then when the particular survey is out for people to respond to, we'll put that in the notes on the Language on the Move blog that embeds this interview as well. And then people will be able to, as I understand it, respond online to the survey or over the phone or in person and in a written form as well. So as that information is available, we'll share that with this interview. So for now, thanks so much again, Zoe for talking me through this survey and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel. Subscribe, leave a 5 star review on your podcast app of choice and of course please recommend the Language on the Move podcast and I'll partner the new books network to your students, your colleagues, your friends. Speak to you next time.
- [41:49]
B
Thank you.