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The languages throughout the world are in crisis and it is estimated that 50% to 90% will have disappeared by the end of this century (Grenoble, 2012). Colonisation, nationalism, urbanisation and

This paper explores the interface between language planning and language revival, based on current efforts to reclaim and reintroduce Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide Plains. This language probably had not been used on a daily basis for the best part of 130 years, until recent efforts in the 1990s to revive it. Using written records, efforts are now being made to piece the language together and to develop a written and spoken language that addresses contemporary needs. Micro language planning is salient in the revival context. Indeed, language planning in this context typically involves individual learners and users of the language, small groups and very small organisations. This paper extends the vision of language planners to include languages hitherto regarded as 'dead' or 'extinct'. Language planning has as much to offer in these situations as it does for major world languages.

Until now, a list of som e eighty w ords has been considered to be part of the corpus of m aterial on the languages of Tasm ania. Plomley, the m ost com prehensive source on the docum entation of the languages of T asm ania,1 attributes these K aurna w ords, com piled by Charles Robinson, the son of George A ugustus Robinson, to the Ben Lomond area of north-east T asm ania.2In this paper I will dem onstrate that these eighty w ords are irrefutably Kaurna, the language of A delaide and the A delaide Plains of South Australia. Further, I will put forw ard a probable explanation as to how these w ords came to be included w ithin the Robinson papers. F urther I will identify the Kaurna w om an w ho w as the probable source. Kaurna words first noticed within Tasmanian materialsEarly in 1993, I first noticed the K aurna w ord kauwe 'w ater' w ritten as cow.ive w hen flicking through Plom ley's 1976 A Word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages. O ver several decades of painstaking work, Plom ley has collated alm ost all of the w ords ever recorded on the languages of Tasm ania. Plomley compiled his w ordlist from the records of at least thirty different observers, gathering together all the w ords from the various sources and listing them u nder an English headw ord. So under the w ord for 'w ater' for instance, Plom ley lists w ords recorded by these different observers and has taken care to specify the source, location and inform ant, w here such inform ation is available.Cow.iue seem ed out of place am ongst the other w ords recorded for w ater. It w as shorter than m ost of the other Tasm anian w ords w hich are often polysyllabic. Variants of other term s for w ater w ere given by a n um ber of observers, w hereas cow.we stood out on its own. Interestingly, other w ords lar.cun.er and la.un.er for w ater w hich are cognate w ith other Tasm anian languages are provided also for the Ben Lomond language. No other Tasm anian w ords for w ater were rem otely sim ilar to cow.we. I didn't think much of it at the time. At that stage I suspected that it m ight have been a K aurna w ord that 1 Plomley 1976. ' This list of Kaurna words is insignificant in number relative to the total corpus of Tasmanian materials. Plomley (1976) lists some 1400 English head words. Under each of these head w ords are numerous alternative terms and minor variations of spelling as recorded by the different observers of the various Tasmanian languages.