In this chapter, we explore how multilingual Australian Aboriginal children who have Standard English as an additional language/dialect engage in translanguaging practices through both playfulness and precarity in the school context. We begin by exploring their various linguistic repertoires and then examine how they playfully use translanguaging to move fluidly between these languages as they engage interactively both inside and outside the classroom. We discuss how such ‘translanguaging’ can contribute to learning by enabling Aboriginal students to take advantage of all the linguistic resources they have at their disposal which allow them to ‘construct, manage, negotiate and perform’ activities in positive ways within the classroom. However, there is precarity in the classroom meaning-making process because of the inherent linguistic racism of school as experienced by such students. Teachers often lack any understanding of the languages the students bring to school, which can result in teachers viewing student languages within a deficit model as ‘poor’ or ‘broken’ English. Yet the students’ facility with their languages, and the ease and confidence with which they move across languages, amply demonstrates the equality of their language to that of English. We propose that despite the challenges, language play can mitigate against the precarity.

This chapter looks at the spread of English to countries of the Southern Hemisphere, notably Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These “Southern Hemisphere Englishes” (including the islands of Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands in the South Atlantic) have been found to have a lot in common both historically and linguistically: similar settlement periods (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and strategies (typically large-scale, organized settlement moves of lower- and middle-class people from the British Isles, mainly southern and south-eastern England). Their descendants today constitute large native-speaking communities of direct British ancestry. They faced similar situations – unfamiliar territory and climate and, most importantly, the need to deal and communicate with earlier residents of the areas they migrated to. In the long run, these peoples – Aboriginals in Australia; Maoris in New Zealand; Africans, Afrikaners, and later also Indians in South Africa – have adopted and transformed English, using it for their own purposes, and many of them have shifted to it, thus producing new ethnic varieties like Aboriginal English or Maori English. Cast studies and language samples focus on Australian English (including a discussion of pronunciation features in a "footie" sports program) and South African varieties of English.

Australasia and the Pacific encompass a range of diverse native and non-native Englishes, including contact varieties such as pidgins and creoles. The chapter provides a new approach to these varieties by focusing on their geographical closeness and structural patterns that have the potential of being areal features of Australasian and (South) Pacific Englishes. Owing to the interaction of conditioning factors in language evolution, such features are not only difficult to define but also difficult to trace. Therefore, a significant section of the chapter provides a detailed theoretical discussion on areal features in Australasia and the South Pacific. Finally, three different scenarios are outlined in which the emergence of areal features for at least a number of these varieties seems to be apparent: parallel developments of Australian and New Zealand English; the possible influence of Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand on other varieties; and the effect of similarities in substrate languages, cultural practices, and in the external ecology as a precursor to areal features for ESL, EFL, ethnic varieties, pidgins, and creoles in Australasia and the Pacific.