Languages of Australia’s First Peoples in Narrative

Celebrating the diverse languages of Australia’s First Peoples, this book presents stories told by elders in eighteen languages from around the continent, and explores their patterns of meaning.

The stories recount the experiences of the tellers and histories of their communities, from tales of anti-colonial resistance to origin stories of the Dreaming. The book aims to make the languages accessible and engaging through the voices of the elders, while building readers’ knowledge about language and language learning. It opens with some basic language knowledge for reading the stories. Each chapter then begins with the cultural and historical contexts of the stories, which are first previewed in English translation, then presented sentence-by-sentence, setting out the original sounds and wordings, glossed with plain English. Extracts are selected to illustrate patterns of meanings that are characteristic of each language. The final chapter sums up the various meaning patterns the stories use, and interprets their evolution in the light of First Peoples’ deep histories, as recorded by archaeology and traditional knowledge.
The book will be useful for language learning programs in communities and schools, for researchers of language and language teaching, and for any reader with an interest in the languages and cultures of Australia’s First Peoples.