My name is Glenis Collard. I'm a Nyoongar woman from the South West 
of Western Australia. I'm from the Baladong mob. I for many years, 
over 20 years now, have worked in the area of language.
I had the privilege of being the first Aboriginal Nyoongar worker
to go and collect data from all our Elders who were 80 plus at the time 
that was in the mid 80s. We got a lot of language off them,
but what happened at that time was that I found that there was a lot
of Aboriginal English used in that language. So the old fellas would
be telling me all these stories. And I think that's where, today,
I know that's been Aboriginal, they call it, Aboriginal English,
linguists call it 'Aboriginal English' because it's English words but
they have Aboriginal meaning. It's crucial to know that that has been
the carrier of our culture, it's held our culture together, it's held
the old stories and that was through the policies of when my people
weren't allowed to speak their traditional languages - they could go
to jail, all the punishments. So they learnt some English but it was 
in a context for them to speak and keep alive the stories of what happened.
And what we're dealing with today is, we have many languages around,
but the languages are mostly on language revival programs to revive but
the hard thing there is, is that you can't find a Nyoongar word for
'computer' or 'aeroplanes' or 'icons'. All these new things that have been
introduced into our world, there are no Nyoongar Aboriginal words for them.
So that's where the language cuts to an extent. But then a few languages
have gone on because they have incorporated that. But that's a very hard
thing to do - linguists take many years working with people to do that.
Aboriginal English is the most commonly spoken language amongst Aboriginal people
all across Australia. A lot of our people don't even know that they
speak it, but they do speak it. They'll laugh at the same time,
they'll talk and tell you things, and probably because my ear is tuned in
from working with the linguists for over 20 years, I'm very aware of even 
when I work in part with Charlie Perkins - I didn't think that he could 
speak Aboriginal English and he could, it was in Canberra for the Land Rights.
It's like 'Wow, he can speak it', so we were all speaking the same.