Language landscapes of children in remote Australia

Many Indigenous communities in remote Australia are multilingual, and often the languages being spoken in the community are rapidly changing. Traditional languages are spoken by some people, but at the same time new languages are being developed based on the interaction of traditional languages, English and an English-based creole. These new languages vary along a continuum. At one end, the way of talking is close to the way many people in rural Australia talk. At the other end are mixed languages, in which the structure of the new language contains words and features of several languages. In the middle of the range are varieties of an English-based creole. Children in these multilingual communities grow up in language landscapes that are often undergoing rapid change. In this paper I report on some findings from the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project, a longitudinal study recording interactions between pre-school children and their care-givers in some remote Indigenous communities. I consider the findings about language shift in the light of national Census data on the demography of remote Indigenous Australia. I also consider the implications of government policy towards Indigenous Australians for language shift