 The number of Lardil speakers has diminished dramatically since Kenneth Hale's study of the language in the late 1960s.Hale worked with a few dozen speakers of Lardil, some of these fluent older speakers, and others younger members of the community who had only a working or passive understanding.When Norvin Richards, a student of Hale's, returned to Mornington Island to continue work on Lardil in the 1990s, he found Lardil children had no understanding of the language and that only a handful of aging speakers remained; Richards has stated that "Lardil was deliberately destroyed" by assimilation and relocation programs in the years of the "Stolen Generation".