From First Languages Australia, Shaun Davies speaks Yugambeh, a language of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Learn more: https://firstlanguages.org.au/.

The speaker(s) featured herein have not explicitly agreed to distribute this video for reuse. For inquiries on licensing this video, please contact First Languages Australia: https://firstlanguages.org.au/.

According to a 2005 study, Yugambeh, also known as Mibanah, from Mibanah gulgun, has only one speaker; and it's unclear whether that refers to Shaun or his grandmother, who passed the language onto him. Measuring the vitality of smaller languages is challenging because census data is often sparse and incomplete. Yugambeh is a member of the Pama–Nyungan linguistic family, one of the most diverse and geographically distributed in all Australia. Like all Indigenous languages of Australia and the Torres Strait, Yankunytjatjara fell into steep decline over the 1900s, as forced assimilation policies designed by the Australian government coerced Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders to abandon their ancestral languages in favor of English. The most brutal of these policies included the forced abduction of Indigenous children—the Stolen Generation—who were sent to boarding schools where they were given English names and punished for speaking their languages. Today, Yankunytjatjara is one of many Australian languages to be experiencing a renaissance, as language champions like Karina Lester work to pass their cultures onto the next generation. First Languages Australia (FLA), which recorded this video, is part of that movement. An organization by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, FLA is working to safeguard and amplify the linguistic heritage of Australia's more than two-hundred Indigenous nations. Learn more about their work here: https://firstlanguages.org.au/.

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