The habitat of Australia's Aboriginal languages: past, present and future

摘要

Language 'ecology', 'habitat' and 'landscape' are related metaphors that have been used to describe the relations between languages in a country or, rather, between speakers of different languages who have to do with each other. The beauty of thernmetaphor is its susceptibility to different interpretations, and most of the authors use it in enlightening ways. In their introduction, Leitner and Malcolm use the 'habitat' metaphor for the sociocultural and historical contexts in which indigenous Australian languages have been and are spoken. As part of the attempt to give broad coverage and a general picture, they downplay the regional differences between speakers of indigenous languages (the semi-settled fishing-based communities often have different social structures from the desert hunter-gatherers). The attempts to generalise, perhaps, account for the disappointing lack of maps which could have cast further light on the habitat metaphor.