Language shift and death of indigenous languages in Australia

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Regensburg, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: As the sailor Captain Cook occupied the Eastern half of Australia in the name of the English King George III in 1770 the foundation for the language contact between English and Aboriginal languages has been laid. This occupation and the spread of British colonisation had a disastrous impact on the indigenous languages of Australia. After the English government had decided to found a penal colony in Botany Bay, Australia, in order to oppose the overcrowding in the British prisons, the First Fleet with 736 prisoners reached Australia on January 26th in 1788. Up to the arrival of the first British people in 1788 about 300,000 native inhabitants, later called Aborigines, lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years and about 230 distinct languages as well as 500 to 600 dialects were once spoken by the native Australians. The characteristic in Australian languages is that due to the lack in influence from other languages, Aboriginal languages are mostly independent of other language families. After about one century, however, the population of the Aboriginal Australians was reduced to 50,000 people. Moreover, after 200 years of British settlement only 90 indigenous languages were left. Approximately 70 out of these languages were threatened by extinction and only half of them still remained between ten and one hundred speakers.