The overview of this learning area invites students to make “interlinguistic and intercultural comparisons across languages, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, to develop understanding of concepts related to the linguistic landscape of Australia and to the concepts of language and culture in general”. As discussed earlier in this paper, an overview of the range of languages in the Living Archive demonstrates the vast range and complexity of languages spoken in the Northern Territory (and by extension around Australia).

In a Languages Other Than English (LOTE context, it is possible to research connections between the target language speakers and Indigneous people, for example, an Italian teacher might refer to one of the earliest documentations of a Top End language which was made by an Italian missionary, Angelo Confalonieri (1847). A French teacher might find useful references in a site dedicated to French anthropologists researching Australian Aboriginal groups at AusAnthrop (Dousset, 2003). As noted previously, there are a number of references to the Japanese interactions with northern Australia during WWII, and an Indonesian class may find it interesting to note words borrowed from the Macassan traders, such as djorra and rrupiya. Other books speak of the importance of language to the identify of Indigenous Australians, such as Marika (1991) on clan classifications, and Morrison (n.d.) who describes language shift in Warumungu over the last few decades.

Taken from Bow, C. (2016). Using authentic language resources to incorporate Indigenous knowledges across the Australian Curriculum. Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts, 20, 20–39. Available from http://www.cdu.edu.au/northern-institute/lcj/10.18793/LCJ2016.20.03 

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