# Wikitongues - Shaun speaking Yugambeh Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders

From First Languages Australia, Shaun Davies speaks Yugambeh, a language of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Learn more: https://firstlanguages.org.au/.

The speaker(s) featured herein have not explicitly agreed to distribute this video for reuse. For inquiries on licensing this video, please contact First Languages Australia: https://firstlanguages.org.au/.

According to a 2005 study, Yugambeh, also known as Mibanah, from Mibanah gulgun, has only one speaker; and it's unclear whether that refers to Shaun or his grandmother, who passed the language onto him. Measuring the vitality of smaller languages is challenging because census data is often sparse and incomplete. Yugambeh is a member of the Pama–Nyungan linguistic family, one of the most diverse and geographically distributed in all Australia. Like all Indigenous languages of Australia and the Torres Strait, Yankunytjatjara fell into steep decline over the 1900s, as forced assimilation policies designed by the Australian government coerced Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders to abandon their ancestral languages in favor of English. The most brutal of these policies included the forced abduction of Indigenous children—the Stolen Generation—who were sent to boarding schools where they were given English names and punished for speaking their languages. Today, Yankunytjatjara is one of many Australian languages to be experiencing a renaissance, as language champions like Karina Lester work…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2020
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: Wikitongues
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikitongues_-_Shaun_speaking_Yugambeh_Aboriginal_Australians_and_Torres_Strait_Islanders_.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Wikitongues
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/90798937?play=1)