1st Edition

Indigenous Multilingualism at Warruwi Cultivating Linguistic Diversity in an Australian Community

By Ruth Singer Copyright 2023
198 Pages 18 Color & 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

198 Pages 18 Color & 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

1.Introduction 2. Becoming Warruwi, becoming Mawng 3. Diversity of peoples and languages at Warruwi 4. Stories of lives and languages 5. Receptive multilingualism and its alternatives 6. How the social shapes linguistic diversity. References

Biography

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).