Sudanese Languages in Melbourne: Linguistic Demography and Language Maintenance

simon.musgrave arts.monash.edu.au; j.hajek unimelb.edu.au Abstract. The Sudanese community in Australia is quite small, but has grown very rapidly over the past decade. The major language groups of this community – Arabic, English, Dinka – are recognised in the Australian community and middle-sized languages such as Nuer and Acholi have also achieved some recognition. The focus of our re-search, however, is Sudanese languages with small speaker popula-tions in the homeland and correspondingly very small populations in Melbourne. Discovery techniques based on census data or other gov-ernment records almost inevitably miss such groups and include them in “other ” categories. The first phase of our interview-based research involves a more detailed mapping of the linguistic demography of the Sudanese community in Melbourne and has initially targeted speakers from two linguistically diverse regions: the Equatoria region, where speakers identify at least 20 languages with a population in Melbourne, and the Nuba mountains, with at least 10 languages represented in Melbourne. We discuss here issues related to the invisibility of such speaker groups, whether it is possible to separate languages and dia-lects of languages (especially in the case of varieties of Bari found in the Equatorian community), and what possibilities exist for documen-tation and language maintenance in this diasporic community