Language mixing and language shift in Indigenous Australia

Australian Indigenous languages are undergoing rapid loss through language shift to English and English-based creoles, particularly in the last 50 years. Less than 20 traditional languages are now being learnt fully by children. Many people in education add to this trend by emphasising English-only schools and disregarding Indigenous languages, failing to understand how normal and advantageous bilingualism is. It is important to understand the language ecologies in Indigenous communities that are leading to language shift and radical language change, as this may be a key to preventing further losses. This chapter reviews ways of looking at how languages relate to each other in multilingual situations, and hypotheses about outcomes which flow from them, including the domains approach of Fishman, and the approaches to social meaning in code-switching of Gumperz and others. Then a number of earlier and recent studies of language change and language shift in Indigenous communities are examined.