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.

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).

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