Ethnic Englishes, Indigenous and Migrant Languages: Policy and Education

This book and its companion, Australia's Many Voices. Australian English - The National Language, develop and apply such an approach. The present book deals with non-mainstream varieties of English, indigenous, migrant, and contact languages. Based on census and other data to 2003, it addresses themes such as language demographics, language shift, and socio-psychological factors that bear upon it. Language change is discussed from the angle of the uprooting of indigenous languages from their original context, of transplantation, and of contact with English. Pidgins and creoles are located inside the Pacific context of the nineteenth century.

This study provides an analysis of language and language-education policies to 2003 and connects this theme with the role of Australian English, the national language. It suggests that Australia's habitat is reaching a new stage of plurilingual tolerance.

The book is of interest for specialists from a wide range of language and policy disciplines. Its discursive, non-technical style makes it accessible to non-specialists with no background in linguistics.