The connection between social and emotional wellbeing and Indigenous language use varies across language ecologies in Australia

This research examines relationships between social and emotional wellbeing in various language ecology contexts. Previous studies have shown a correlation between speaking an Indigenous language and improved social and emotional wellbeing among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the population nationally. This study considers the rich variety of contemporary Indigenous language contexts and the extent to which traditional languages, new contact languages and English are spoken. It adopts the concept of ‘language ecologies’ — the different configurations of languages spoken in a location — to investigate how the relationship between Indigenous language use (traditional or new), and social and emotional wellbeing varies by ecology type. We classify the country geographically into five language ecology types, and use regression analysis to investigate associations between Indigenous language use and social and emotional wellbeing by language ecology type. We find heterogenous associations across different language ecologies Speaking an Indigenous language is associated with lower than average levels of wellbeing in areas where English is frequently spoken as a first language, while it is associated with greater than average wellbeing in other areas. Associations between wellbeing and speaking an Indigenous language are relatively larger in areas where traditional Indigenous languages are frequently spoken as a first language than in other areas. The findings suggest that the extent and type of wellbeing benefits from speaking an Indigenous language are dependent on the type of languages in individuals' language repertoires (person-based) and the language contexts where they live (place-based language ecologies).