A particularly interesting feature of Aboriginal languages is the influence of kinship on special speech registers.
In Australia, hundreds of Aboriginal languages are extinct as a result of harsh assimilation in the past.
Despite the challenges, Bracknell said the internet posed a huge potential for maintaining the health of Aboriginal languages and other minority languages.
Nevertheless, there are hundreds of Aboriginal languages, though many have become extinct since 1950, and most of the surviving languages have very few speakers.
Projects such as the Living Archive of Aboriginal languages, developing language apps and "localisation" of commonly used sites such as Facebook are vital to the preservation and increased accessibility to indigenous languages, she said.
"If the preservation of Aboriginal languages does not become a priority for both government and Aboriginal communities, then what the residential schools failed to accomplish will come about through a process of systemic neglect," the report reads.
All of the Strong Women Workers Workers who participated in the evaluation are multilingual and are fluent in at least one, and often a number of Aboriginal languages.
Linguist R.M.W. Dixon of James Cook University, Cairns, in Australia, who made his name in the 1960s and 1970s doing fieldwork on Aboriginal languages, says these languages are so unique that new theories of linguistic change must be invented to explain them.
For related reasons, in 1998 the Queensland government issued a code of conduct with suggestions such as these: That visitors learn a few words of the Aboriginal language, and be aware that avoiding eye contact is a sign of respect.
Estimates of the number of distinct Aboriginal languages at the time of European contact range from 200 to 300.
