Multilingualism

Aboriginal Australia was, and is, fundamentally multilingual, and multilingualism is embedded in social, cultural, spiritual, and economic life. Linguistic repertoires are typically highly complex, and deployed in diverse ways from community to community. This chapter explores the shape and function of multilingual practices in Aboriginal Australia by considering the nature of individual language repertoires and community language ecologies, and by highlighting associated cultural phenomena. The chapter traces the evolution of scholarly work on multilingualism in the region, and contrasts the contemporary context with a historical perspective on language practices in the region. Multilingualism in pre-colonial Australia is revealed to have been fundamentally implicated in territoriality, kinship, mobility, and relationships between social groups. In contemporary Australia these connections persist, but the deployment of multilingual repertoires additionally reflects new communicative goals and is shaped by the emergence of widely spoken post-colonial contact varieties like Australian Kriol.