Representing Australia’s Aboriginal languages in fictional television

This article focuses on the representation of Australian Aboriginal languages in fictional television series, using ‘textual tracing’ to analyse their treatment across screenplays/scripts, dialogue, English subtitles/closed captions, and post-production scripts. The data consists of recent ‘mainstream’ series that cater to mixed audiences on Australian public broadcasters (ABC, SBS). While we identify a lot of variation between and within the examined text types, one common trend is the lack of specificity regarding Aboriginal languages in scripts and other texts across the production chain. They are often signalled but not specified, and rarely fully present. Thus, linguistic diversity remains largely invisible in these texts, impacting the television audience and their perception of the linguistic landscape of Australia. Some of the counter examples and exceptions that we discuss demonstrate that it is possible to make different choices. Together, the analyses show that textual tracing, combined with other insights from production processes, can help us gain a deeper understanding of the choices made around representations of multilingualism in the media. This in turn illustrates the potential contribution that linguists can make to diversity studies and recommendations for the television industry.