Australian Aboriginal contact with the English language in New South Wales: 1788 to 1845 (original) (raw)
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Language and Linguistics Compass, 2008
The more than 250 languages spoken in Australia prior to the nineteenth century exhibit both striking similarities to one another and remarkable variation. The exponential increase in what linguists have learned about these languages since the 1960s has been sadly in inverse proportion to the number of people learning them as a mother tongue. This article will review some of the most exciting recent developments in Australianist linguistic research, while also acknowledging the context of language loss and disenfranchisement within which they are situated. The message it offers is ultimately optimistic, however. For the languages still spoken regularly, research into the previously neglected components of the multimodal communicative system that is language in use is adding new depth to the existing documentation. For the majority of Australia's indigenous languages – where economic, social and political pressures have taken their toll – a different set of concerns has emerged. Linguists are now grappling with a range of theoretical and empirical questions regarding the mechanisms of language contact and attrition, even as they continue to contribute new insights into the traditional ‘core’ fields of phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and historical linguistics. Moreover, an increasing consciousness of the respective roles of outsider researcher and speech community is changing not only the methodologies of linguists ‘in the field’, but also the research itself. All of these factors will shape the directions of future Australianist linguistic research, as well as the number and nature of languages that remain to be studied.
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Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and public discourse. There are diverse assumptions as to its relation to pidgin, creole and interlanguage varieties, as well as to Australian English. In an attempt to provide some clarification, this paper compares Aboriginal English with the main varieties with which it bears some relationship, either historically (as in the case of the English of Southeast England and Ireland) or geographically (as in the case of Australian English and Australian pidgins and creoles). It does this by employing the morphosyntactic database of the World Atlas of Varieties of English (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer, 2012). The electronic database on morphosyntactic vari...
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Abstract Australian linguistic prehistory has lagged behind equivalent endeavours on other continents in part because of the dearth of grammars and dictionaries until recent times, when there has been a great deal of high quality work done. Australianist linguists have tended not to use the standard comparative method. In some cases, this was because it was prematurely judged inapplicable in Australia, due to supposed very high levels of diffusion, which did not allow cognates to be distinguished from loans. This view is losing ground as ...