Filling lexicai gaps in a bilingual con text: the cases of Australian Finnishand Hungarian Almost all of the minority groups (aboriginals and immigrants) in multilingual Australia have gone through a gradual or complete language shift: the domains of minority language use are becoming restricted and English is used more and more. Although language shift is mainly caused by extralinguistic factors, it is important to examine how this process takes place in the minority language. The paper analyses lexicai gaps in Australian Finnish and Hungarian spoken language data from the point of view of language shift. Because language change in contact situation usually begins with lexicai changes, the author examines whether the missing lexicai elements in Ll and the ways of filling them in speech have an important role in changing other grammaticai elements