ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces Warruwi Community and the two main questions addressed in the book. Warruwi Community is a small Indigenous community in Australia’s north that is unusual because many small Indigenous languages are still spoken there. In most contemporary Indigenous Australian communities, only one ancestral Indigenous language is still spoken. The first question addressed in the book is how Warruwi Community has been able to maintain so many ancestral Indigenous languages in a highly multilingual speech community. The second is how Mawng, a very small language of only a few hundred speakers, has been maintained and come to be the main language of the community. The chapter also profiles four women of different generations in brief linguistic biographies that preview more detailed accounts to follow in the book. The practice of receptive multilingualism, which plays an important role at Warruwi, is introduced. Comparisons are made between multilingualism at Warruwi and other sites of small-scale multilingualism around the world. Finally, the methods used in the book are outlined and an overview of the remaining chapters is provided.
