Aboriginal Studies: Australian Aboriginal Languages

Barani Site, City of Sydney

Filter by category, interactive tool

Learning the Aboriginal meaning of place names will deepen our connection to the land we all live on.

ABC TV series available on YouTube. Indigenous communities share the stories behind place names of their country.

Australian Government. This Report strengthens the evidence base regarding the use, importance, and state of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

Government, Australia. Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs report on the inquiry into language learning in Indigenous communities. 2012

A wealth of resources for K-10 students including streaming video from the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Indigenous ways of thinking and how Aboriginal languages shape experience.

Austlang provides information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. AUSTLANG can be searched by using the mapping feature, by language name (including a range of spellings); placenames and via the codes if you already know them. Austlang has links to MURA (the AIATSIS catalogue); OZBIB (a curated bibliography about Indigenous Australian languages); and other online resources.

AuSIL serves Indigenous language communities in Australia and the Timor region by means of linguistic research and documentation, translation, training, and the development of language resources.

Annotated links to 515 resources for over 150 languages.

First Languages Australia Resources

A website that supports the 250 plus Aboriginal Languages that exist in this country.

PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for DIgital Sources in Endangered Cultures) curates digital material about small or endangered languages.

Patyegarang has been designed to answer questions about the teaching of Australian languages, with a particular focus on language revival. Islander teachers of their languages.

Discover your language by map. The Rediscovering Indigenous Languages project aims to preserve and revitalise some of the oldest languages in the world by locating, digitising and providing access to Indigenous word lists, language records and other cultural documents.

A major exhibition at the Library celebrates UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages.

Stories from Aboriginal Elders and language custodians across the state.

An online storybook written and spoken in five Aboriginal languages from across NSW.

History, English and Creative Arts activities for K-6

Interactive Queenslander Languages Map where you can explore the diverse Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

To accompany the Interactive Queenslander Languages Map.

State Library of Queensland

ReTold is a collection of online stories gathered in partnership with Torres Strait Islander language speakers and community members living in mainland Queensland.

Cape Treasures is a collection of animations and group stories by children from four communities in Cape York.

AIATSIS

AIATSIS IYIL2019 Projects and Initiatives

This interactive map showcases over 780 languages. Includes link to Teachers' Notes.

The diverse languages of black Australia from Anmatyerre to Arrernte, from Bidjara to Bundjalung, from Nyungar to Ngaanyatjarra, from Yankunytjatjara to Yorta Yorta - one word at a time.

From the Australian Broadcasting Commission. These resources are a great start to learning about the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and how important they are to all Australians.

ABC Education: Children from around Australia encourage you to join them as they share greetings in their Indigenous languages.

Languages of our Land is an active learning Interstitial series sharing the Aboriginal language of Yugambeh, located in South East Queensland.

Australian Broadcasting Commission

SBS Website, these books developed by Diane Riley-McNaboe and Lynette Riley
PDFs of Workbooks 1 & 2 freely available

Apple App Store website

Wikiwand site, a brief overview with sample words

The map was developed along with the Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia as part of a research project. The Encyclopedia is available in libraries and contains more detailed information about the groups represented on the map.

The Australian Indigenous Languages Collection at AIATSIS is their main source of research and is continually updated with research outcomes. It now contains over 4300 titles and has been independently found to be of such world significance that it has been placed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register.

the AIATSIS Catalogue

Pathways contains the terms used to describe the items in the AIATSIS Collections. Including, a thesaurus for subjects relating to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, language groups and people, and place names.

Gabina-Gabina Dhabal is the Yuwi translation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The open access archive contains thousands of authentic texts in Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory, many with English translations and rich illustrations. Many of the resources were produced during the era of bilingual education in the Northern Territory, beginning in the 1970s, and were mostly created by Indigenous people for Indigenous children who spoke an Indigenous language at home.