 My name is Gillard Sokaman. I am professor of linguistics and chair of endangered languages at the University of Adelaide in Australia. I have been involved with language reclamation for several years, with linguistics for many, many years, and it's a great pleasure to live in Australia. Okay cool, so Esperanus, we generally, obviously we love languages type of thing, and you work within the whole area of reviving languages, especially Aboriginal languages. So what's the biggest challenge with that? The first important challenge is to ensure that all the community of Aboriginal people would like to reclaim their language. The more people the better, and of course I'm not interested in laboratorial reclamation, so I'm not interested in reclaiming language in a laboratory. I'm interested to work together with the community. After that, we have the challenge that for reclamation you have to give up some other activities. For example, say every Sunday, instead of playing football or a footy or soccer, you need to go to study the language of your ancestors. And of course, some children might prefer football, might prefer soccer. However, I have to say that the more I speak to Aboriginal Australians, the more I see how important they consider language as. They agree with me that language is the loss of language, is the loss of cultural autonomy, the loss of language is the loss of intellectual sovereignty. They feel that it's a loss of their soul, a loss of heritage. Now, the next difficulty is how do we, for example, teach the grammar of the language? You know, you need to teach people who are not linguists, they might not know IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet. I believe that we need to use a very user-friendly accessible spelling. It's true that Shakespeare spelled his surname in five different ways. None of which was S-H-A-K-E-S-P-E-A-R-E, none of which, so spelling was not important. But nowadays it is sometimes important because you have this kind of tendency towards unity. Everybody wants, oh, a Bangalai is written, B-A-R-N-G-A-R-L-A, rather than Bangala, which is how, for example, Glamour Wilhelm Schumann wrote down his dictionary with B rather than B. As you know, in Aboriginal languages there is no difference between P and B, no differences between D and T, no difference between G and K, by and large. So it doesn't really matter whether it's Ghana or Ghana or Camilo or Camilo. You mentioned grammar previously. What is the biggest difference between, say, English grammar and Aboriginal, obviously all Aboriginal languages are different, but just in general? In general, whereas the phonetics and phonology are relatively easy, the cases are much harder. You have ergative case, for example, as opposed to accusative case. So, for example, when you say the dog sleeps, the dog will be similar to I see the dog, but if you want to say the dog eats the apple, the dog will actually be different because this is the dog which is the subject or the agent of a transitive verb. So this is an ergative system, which is very different from English. In Aboriginal languages we have many, many pronouns, many, many pronouns to learn. You have dual, sometimes you have hyperplural. In Bangala, mina means eye, minalbili means two eyes, minary means eyes, plural. And then if you have many, many eyes, like you eat many, many eyes of a kangaroo, of many kangaroos, you say minaliarana. So you have mina, minalbili, minary, minaliarana. In English you only have eye and eyes, so you only have two options. In Bangala, which is a Torayura, Aboriginal language of Air Peninsula, you have four different options. So this is just an example of the wealth, of the richness of Aboriginal languages. Okay, cool. And my final question is, because I run an Esperanto channel, what do you think about Esperanto? I think it's a wonderful idea. It's a very Jewish idea. And even if I didn't know, I would have guessed that the inventor was Jewish. You can see it in Esperanto very clearly. There is a Yiddish component there, of course, along with the German, with the Slavonic, with the Italian component. I think that to have a language that unifies the world is beautiful. I personally believe that every person should have at least four mother tongues. So for example, you can have your national mother tongue, you can have your universal mother tongue, be Esperanto, be it English. Then you can have your heritage mother tongue, and for example, Bangala, in the case of an Aboriginal Australian, and then you can have a fourth mother tongue, which is another language. So absolutely, I do not think that Esperanto contradicts the reclamation or revitalization or reinvigoration of endangered languages. On the contrary, most of the Esperantists I know are actually language lovers, and they love languages, including minority languages and languages that are very much to be empowered. Awesome, thanks for that. It's a pleasure.