Indigenous Multilingualism at Warruwi

This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people’s ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there.Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community.This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.

Ruth Singer is a linguist who researches multilingual language practices in collaboration with Warruwi Community, an Indigenous community of Arnhem land (Australia). Her current interest is in exploring how local kinds of multilingualism have shaped diversity among the languages of Arnhem land. Ruth Singer also creates digital language resources with Warruwi Community including producing films with young people and an online dictionary of Mawng. Her language documentation work has involved building archival collections of Mawng and other languages of Warruwi in their multilingual context. She also writes about collaborative approaches to linguistic research with Indigenous communities. Ruth Singer is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Research Unit for Indigenous Language and the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne (Australia).