Language Planning in Australia

Abstract

Australia is an island continent, that includes a number of small off-shore islands, and the very large island of Tasmania, lying between the Indian and South Pacific Oceans and the sixth largest polity in the world with an area of 2, 967, 893 sq. miles or 7, 686, 850 sq. km. It is an arid ancient land that is about a third desert with most of the population (18, 783, 551) living along the coasts, in the south-east corner and in the capital cities. Australia is a federation of six states (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia), two Territories (Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory) with a number of overseas territories (Ashmore and Carter Islands, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Island, Coral Sea Islands, Heard and McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island as well as claims to a large portion of Antarctica), some of which are not permanently inhabited. Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea lie to the north, other parts of Melanesia lie to the north east, New Zealand lies to the east across the Tasman Sea while Antarctica is to the south. (See Appendix A, Figure 13.) While English is the dominant language, there are more than 200 migrant languages spoken in Australia and perhaps 90 Aboriginal languages remain, although there is ongoing language loss of both languages and registers and only a small number—about 20— are spoken ‘right through’.KeywordsLanguage PolicyAboriginal PeopleSign LanguageLanguage TeachingTorres Strait IslanderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.