Australian Indigenous Languages

2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. A few years ago, the United Nations reported that of the six-and-a-half-thousand languages spoken around the world, about 40 per cent are in danger of dying out.

Professor Alan Dench is Professor of Linguistics at Curtin University, and author of several books on the topic of Aboriginal languages.

• What does it mean to ‘preserve’ a language? 0.43
• Does the preservation of Indigenous languages play a broader role in reconciliation? 4.32
• Should Australian school children learn an Indigenous language as a second language, rather than a European or Asian language? 5.17
• How can we encourage broader use of Indigenous languages? 12.45

Links:

• Professor Alan Dench
• Australia's Action Plan
• NAIDOC: Our Languages Matter

Subscribe:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts
• RSS

Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.

Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library

You can read the full transcript for the episode here.