They have been the creators of the two large creoles in Australia. Successive generations of children and teenagers across the world continue to bring new words into their language or change the meaning of existing words. It should be a major objective of maintenance programs for each language to maintain the interest of children, teenagers and young adults in their traditional language and to encourage its use in a variety of ways. 50 4.10 Language maintenance also includes recording of languages, developing dictionaries and grammars. While some recording of languages has been undertaken in an ad-hoc manner over the last 200 years only a few languages have been adequately recorded.
Recording needs to be done in such a way that the language can be subsequently transmitted.
Many languages have been lost and there is an urgent need to record remaining languages. The development of dictionaries and grammars should be undertaken by people with linguistic training. Unfortunately, there continues to be a shortage of funding for trained linguist positions to undertake Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language work. The training of linguists is discussed in Chapter 5. The development of dictionaries and grammars is a time-consuming business.