Which language would that be?

Worawa Aboriginal College at Healesville has reopened. The Age article makes mention of two students from Yuendumu, and their excitement at being able to speak their 'native language' in class. The journalist goes to the trouble of identifying that the students come from Yuendumu, and of explaining that Yuendumu lies 270km north-west of Alice Springs, yet fails to mention the name of their 'native language'.

Given the students come from Yuendumu, we might suppose they speak Warlpiri. An interesting feature of education in Warlpiri communities is their Community Controlled Schools. These schools have language learning (Warlpiri and English) as a high priority. They are also known as Two-Way schools (formerly bilingual). Even though these programs are not being fully-supported, it is unlikely that students are strongly discouraged from speaking Warlpiri in Yuendumu classrooms. One wonders why, then, the journalist took the view that these Warlpiri students should be excited to able to speak their native language in the classroom, given this is probably not a remarkable event for them.

But I guess it is remarkable to a down-south whitefella that some Aboriginal people a) still speak their languages and b) would dare/are able to do so in classrooms, in the wake of historical accounts of children being abused for having done so in the past. So perhaps, the *excitement* is that of the journalist.