It can take just one generation for a language to be lost to the world forever.

This threat is a very real one for Australia's Indigenous languages, but one community is determined this won't happen to them.

Watch online: Bush Medicine

They're teaching young people their language, not with textbooks, but through bush medicine.

In Utopia in Central Australia, elders are working with young people and linguists to preserve their language by speaking it as they pass on their medicinal skills.

"We need to show them where they grow, where they can get it collect it and which parts of the country it grows...It's very important for our children to know so they can go on keeping our culture strong", one of the elders, Berryl, told Living Black.

Video journalist Yaara Bou Melhem travelled to Utopia and learned why these languages are important to all Australians.

TRANSCRIPT:

Aboriginal languages have been fading, but some central Australian communities seem to be bucking that trend. Linguists teamed up with residents to find a novel and therapeutic way of keeping languages alive. Video journalist Yaara Bou Melhem reports.

I'm collecting this flying saucer bush and this plant is (SAYS WORD IN LANGUAGE) in language.

This is not your average tutorial. Here, it's the teachers who come out with the qualifications, but her students have something to gain, too. They're learning skills that can't be found in any textbook. Locals from the NT's Utopia region are collecting plants to make bush medicine.

BERRYL ROSS: We need to show them where they grow, where they can get it, collect it, and which parts of the country it grows.

VOICEOVER: Berryl lives more than 250km north-east of Alice Springs on the Arlparra outstation in Utopia. (SPEAKS LANGUAGE) She's training for a linguist's certificate from the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. It involves talking in language with younger people from her community and training them to make bush medicine. Under strict supervision, the plants they've collected are ground to a pulp. They're then mixed with fat and heated, before being strained, to come up with an ointment. In the process, everyone here speaks in language.

MARGARET CAREW, LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS EXPERT: In Utopia, it's one of the places in Australia where language transmission is happening and this is in a context of rapid language loss in Australia.

VOICEOVER: Utopia's elders approached the Batchelor Institute asking them to help document their bush medicine recipes and methods. Together they've created a unique course written specifically for remote Indigenous Australians.

MARGARET CAREW: We support the ongoing collection and use of bush medicine and we validate that, and we say that that's really relevant in terms of community education. And then we also support the documentation of that knowledge.

VOICEOVER: The process of sourcing and making bush medicine is filmed with the help of youth media workers. Locals are taught editing and filming skills. The DVDs are used as learning resources. Linguists believe recording these dialects is vital, as traditional Indigenous languages fade.

MARGARET CAREW: It only takes a generation for languages to be lost, and they express the richness of knowledge that exists out here, that expresses knowledge that is actually part of all of Australia's cultural heritage. You know, even if you're not Indigenous, this is part of Australia's fund of intellectual knowledge.

VOICEOVER: Berryl doesn't consider her role in Australia's heritage. She only thinks of keeping her traditions alive.

BERRYL ROSS: It's very important for our children to know, so they can go on keeping our culture strong and our bush medicines.

VOICEOVER: It's an age-old practice, and one elders hope can be preserved.
Source: Living Black SBS