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At Warruwi Community (pop. 400), nine very different Indigenous languages are still widely used, which is unusual in the contemporary Australian Indigenous context. Using the receptive multilingual mode, speakers frequently address one another in different languages. This mode offers speakers of small languages such as Mawng (ca. 400 speakers) an alternative to accommodating to larger languages such as Yolngu-matha (ca. 2000 speakers). Although not unique to Warruwi, receptive multilingual practices are part of a set of “mutually constituting ideologies and practices” (Nakassis, 2016) that co-construct a speech community where many small languages flourish.

All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardized tests, such as Australia’s National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the intended benefits of which are increased accountability and improved educational outcomes. The NAPLAN purpose is comparable to that of other state and national ‘core skills’ testing programs, which evaluate cross-sections of populations in order to compare results between population sub-groupings. Such comparisons underpin ‘accountability’ in the era of population-level testing. This study investigates the impact of NAPLAN testing on one population grouping that is prominent in the NAPLAN results’ comparisons and public reporting: children in remote Indigenous communities. A series of interviews with principals and teachers documents informants’ first-hand experiences of the use and effects of NAPLAN in schools. In the views of most participants, the language and content of the test instruments, the nature of the test engagement, and the test washback have negative impacts on students and staff, with little benefit in terms of the usefulness of the test data. The primary issue is the fact that meaningful participation in the tests depends critically on proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE) as a first language. This study contributes to the broader discussion of how reform-targeted standardized testing for national populations affects sub-groups who are not treated equitably by the test instrument or reporting for accountability purposes. It highlights a conflict between consequential validity and the notion of accountability that drives reform-targeted testing.

At Warruwi, a remote Australian Indigenous community, people use a range of Indigenous languages on a daily basis. Adults speak three to eight Indigenous languages and these high levels of multilingualism are out of step with current trends which see most Australian Indigenous communities shifting to a single variety be it a variety of English, a contact variety or a traditional Indigenous language. The three Indigenous languages most widely spoken at Warruwi are quite dissimilar as they belong to separate language families. This article discusses three characteristics of language use at Warruwi that are likely to play a role in supporting the levels of multilingualism found there: the diversity of individual linguistic repertoires, receptive multilingual practices whereby interlocutors address one another in different languages and language ideologies that are quite different to those found elsewhere. Characteristics of multilingualism at Warruwi are compared with those reported for other communities with small-scale multilingualism. Francois’ (2012) concept of egalitarian multilingualism is used as a starting point for the exploration of models of small-scale multilingualism.

The two main types of nominal classification systems in Australian languages — classifiers and genders — are usually easy to distinguish both formally and functionally. However, in the Australian language Mawng, gender agreement carries much of the burden of reference, varies depending on how an entity is construed, and contributes elements of compositional meaning to discourse, with properties usually associated with classifiers rather than genders. The way that semantically-based genders are used in Mawng suggests that we need to add how classification is used to our typologies of nominal classification systems; existing typologies consider mainly morphosyntactic and semantic properties.

A range of intonational devices can be used in the grammar of information and corrective focus marking in languages with relatively free word order. In this paper we explore whether nouns in the Australian Indigenous language Mawng are realised differently depending on syntactic function and focus. Results show that the pitch level associated with Subjects is higher in conditions of corrective focus compared to other utterance contexts and there is a strong correlation between focus and utterance position. Placing a word in a corrective focus context does not appear to have an effect on word duration in this corpus confirming that pitch register variation and intonational phrasing are the major prosodic cues associated with corrective focus in Mawng.