The inquiry was advertised nationally and letters sent to a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations. While the inquiry's title and terms of reference are about language maintenance, there is some divergence of opinion as to what this entails.
Most linguists hold that only a healthy language is capable of being maintained.
Consequently, language maintenance is an activity confined to those languages that are considered healthy. While this may be correct from a linguist's point of view other important issues such as the social, cultural, and educational value of a weakened language need to be taken into account. The committee has taken a broader view of language maintenance activities to include the appropriate promotion, development, recording and retrieval of language. This approach was also taken by most of the people with whom the committee met. The importance of a language to the descendants of its speakers is much broader and more significant than just the linguistic aspects alone.