The Yugambeh digital language story

Abstract The Yugambeh Aboriginal people of south east Queensland have one of the Aboriginal Australian languages at the forefront of digital language resource use for more than a decade. Yugambeh launched one of Australia’s first Aboriginal language apps a decade ago as a word list and more recently partnered with Google to launch a web-based language tool Woolaroo now used by Indigenous groups worldwide. It was a long struggle to gather the community and the resources behind this project and is not a path that can be recommended for every community. We present that history from the perspective of some of those involved to highlight the important steps in this process and significant features that arose. We use an autoethnographic approach to consider the complexities of digitisation of Indigenous languages. The first author was instrumental throughout this campaign, as part of the worldwide movement to revitalise Indigenous languages. The article is a combination of his contribution and other from the community, with the work of the second author who is also Yugambeh and works in developing technology for language revitalisation. We use these voices to highlight the significant aspects of this and other language movements. This revitalisation work has been shown to bring cultural, social and economic benefits as seen in case studies of the Israeli, Māori, Irish and Hawaiian languages. For the Yugambeh language this revitalisation began with the original families understanding who they were and their right to stand up as a community. The combination of community events, opening of the language to all Australians and the ability to adapt to changing technology has enabled this language to grow. This work was supported and carried out by a section of our Elders who understood the importance of community identity and has resulted in significant digital knowledge being gained by the community.