The indigenous population of Australia first came into more or less intensive contact with English speakers in 1788 when the British occupied the area around Port Jackson in New South Wales. As a result, a pidgin developed which was also used as a lingua franca for indigenous-based communication along traditional trade routes. This pidgin also expanded into the Northern Territory where, at the beginning of the 20th century, it began to creolise into RRC (or Kriol as it is also called since 1976) in the context of an Anglican Church mission where a generation of children adopted the pidgin as their first language. An orthography was developed and by the mid-20th century RRC had come to displace an increasing number of indigenous languages. Today it is spoken by at least 20,000 people.