Indigenous languages education in Victoria: Innovations, opportunities and challenges for non-indigenous languages teacher educators

Abstract

Before colonisation, Australia was a linguistically diverse continent, with an estimated 250 Indigenous languages and about 500 spoken varieties of these languages. By 1980, a quarter of these languages had disappeared, a decline which continued over the years, with two-thirds of Indigenous languages gone by 1990. In 2001, only 17 Aboriginal1 languages were classified as actively spoken and used across all age groups.