Hi Gerald and Jaky, and Greg – re your discussion of gathering and analysing more online commentary about these articles, and given Gerald has explained it couldn’t be done, perhaps you can look for new data in 2021. The federal implementation plan for the new Closing the Gap target on strengthening Indigenous languages is due out mid-year, so we should expect to see new articles, with their own satellite bodies of commentary, around that time. Obviously, I hope you can take this analysis further because it’s valuable!

And whatever the results of that implementation plan will be, the target itself is another data point indicating the change in attitudes in Australia towards support for language revitalisation. But how far does that support extend, and will our government be willing or able to lead a change of attitudes for those who remain opposed? Let’s see.

Hi Greg – Thanks for the feedback. You’re right that’s there’s plenty of room for further analysis, and hopefully we’ll be able to find time for that in the future. Just to respond to a few of the points you raised… In terms of general improvement of public attitudes about Indigenous languages, your comments are suggestive of how useful it would be to track these things over time (imagine having data to show how these attitudes changed over the course of years or decades!). It also makes me curious about what is actually going on in that improvement, because there are at least two things happening, I would suggest. One is the emergence of genuine positive attitudes towards Indigenous languages, and the other is increasing reticence to express overtly racist sentiments in public forums. Teasing these two apart is important because the continued existence of covert racism still drives political behaviors (like voting), and so it is really important to understand how much of changing public sentiment is simply the veiling of prejudice that could previously be expressed openly. I’ll skip the second point you raise about taking the specific nature of the articles that were commented on into account – this point is well-taken. Regarding the other methodological issue you raise – we did try and excavate some of the social media commentary about these articles, but given that they are relatively ancient by digital standards, a lot of that commentary no longer exists. But you’re absolutely right that it would provide a much richer picture of public attitudes if we were able to track responses to these articles live and in the digital wild on Twitter, Facebook, etc. This would be particularly helpful in understanding how widespread these denialist arguments are, and the extent to which they are considered publicly acceptable. So hopefully that’s something we’ll be able to do in the future.

Thanks Laura. Although I agree that identifying flaws in these arguments is important, I also think that it should be part of a broader strategy to countering these ideas. In labelling these attitudes ‘denialism,’ we are arguing that they are, in important ways, fact-resistant. There is some literature on how to counter this sort of denialism – work by people like Stanley Cohen, Irene Bruna Seu and Keith Kahn-Harris – and we are currently looking into that in order to learn more about effective ways of combatting Indigenous language denialism.

Thanks Gegentuul. One of the questions I would like to follow up on in future research is how these sentiments are tied to changes in the broader political context, for example, the rise of populism, the rise of the far right. Do these developments foster these ideologies and embolden people to express and act on them? And, conversely, what things might help oppose and counteract these attitudes? Answering these questions would require long-term tracking of public attitudes around Indigenous languages.

Thanks Zubair. I suspect that these sort of attitudes are very widespread, since, as you point out, they emerge from a common colonial foundation. Still, there is ample scope for comparative studies to look at how these ideologies manifest locally, and the extent to which they are connected transnationally.

Many thanks for your support Robert. If you are interested in following up, this is an excellent overview of language revitalization efforts in southeastern Australia since your visit: https://researchprofiles.canberra.edu.au/en/publications/a-linguistic-renaissance-in-the-south-east-of-australia

That’s not to say that denialism still exists. It certainly does! And analysing it is surely still valuable. But I would suggest delving further into the data used for this article. I’ve written two articles for The Conversation on Indigenous languages and, quite to my surprise actually, the comments have been largely positive, so I wondered if part of the negativity found could be to do with the article itself. Looking at the articles in which the data for this article has been drawn from I did feel like some differentiation can be made. The first four articles seem to be articles that have an underlying assumption that everyone thinks Indigenous languages should be supported and/or revitalised (e.g. “Indigenous languages won’t survive if kids are learning only English”), yet we know not all Australians believe that. To me, that explains why some people feel the need to respond negatively – as a reaction to an over-generalised assumption. The fifth article analysed, about Palawa Kani, is an ‘explainer’ type article, and I notice the comments there are more positive – appreciate of informed discussion and explanation. This was also more the style of my two Convo articles which I felt generated generally positive comments so I really think there’s another factor going on with the comment data – whether audience sentiment towards Indigenous languages has been assumed or over-generalised or not. I’m not at all saying that there are “better” and “worse” ways of writing such articles, I’m just suggesting that certain styles of article may generate certain responses so it may be worth looking more critically at the content that commenters are actually responding to.

Which leads me to another point – comments on Conversation articles itself are only one measure of how these articles are responded to. And possibly a fairly limited one. Conversation articles are often shared far and wide on social media and also reposted in full by other media. To really round out an analysis of public sentiment, I think looking at social media commentary (Facebook and Twitter) on those articles will actually give a more rounded picture of what people actually think about the topic. Note that Conversation commentary is not very interactive or embedded in commenters’ social world. Conversation commenters are essentially random individuals and we have few further links to those people and little opportunity to interact with them. This makes Conversation comments susceptible to unchecked grandstanding with no further accountability (i.e. if you want to make a negative comment without it biting you on the bum, you pretty much can). On social media however, our profiles are much more linked to our social identity, and people we know and care about will see what we say and do. In my opinion, commentary on social media can very nicely round out an analysis of where public sentiment is at.

But of course, I’ve done the most annoying thing you can do to busy academics – suggest them to do more analysis when we know full well NO ONE HAS ANY TIME. My main point is, despite denialism still being evident, my own experience is that there have been major changes in attitude and understanding in the past couple of decades. But, I will shut up now and say thanks for the thought provoking piece Jaky and Gerard!