2017/06/23 by Walter Forrest · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Multilingual Education and Policy #Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights #Language Development and Disorders #Indigenous #Grandparent #Language shift #Indigenous language #Linguistics #First language #Sociology #Neuroscience of multilingualism #Gender studies #Psychology #Developmental psychology
paper · doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1334938
openalex publication_date 2017/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
By 2050, the majority of Australia’s surviving Indigenous languages are likely to become extinct. The intergenerational transmission of languages in which children acquire languages from their parents and grandparents is a key mechanism for reversing language shift, but many Australian children whose parents speak an Indigenous language do not speak that language. Using a unique, national survey of Australian Indigenous children, I identify factors associated with the successful intergenerational transmission of Indigenous languages within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. Results highlight the importance of parents’ language use. Although community-level characteristics account for some of the variance in successful language transmission, parents who use Indigenous languages at home, speak them as well as they speak English, and do not also speak a creole language are more likely to pass those languages onto their children.