Preserving Aboriginal languages
Posted on: Tue 22 Jan 2019
At the time of settlement, there were hundreds of languages spoken by millions of Australia’s first nations people.
In the last census, that number was down to one hundred and sixty languages spoken in the home – and only 13 traditional languages are still spoken by children.
We are seeing a resurgence in the number of people trying to reawaken their ancestral languages but Australia is still a long way off reconciling with the damage done to languages that were spoken on this land for thousands of years.
Jane Simpson is chair of Indigenous linguistics at the Australian National University. She joins Breakfast‘s Casey Tonkin.
Produced by Casey Tonkin