2020. Australia and the South West Pacific

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2023

Melanesian and Australian Creoles were originally brought to the attention of linguistics by Hugo Schuchardt (1979 [1883]), one of the founders of the field. His work postulated a connection between Bislama (spoken in Vanuatu) and Queensland Pidgin English (spoken in north-eastern Australia) through the trade of Melanesian slaves in the late 1800s, known as ‘blackbirding’. Schuchardt’s proposal was later elaborated on in Philip Baker’s (1993) detailed comparative study of Melanesian and Australian Creoles. He found that the ultimate origin of these languages was in New South Wales (NSW) Pidgin which developed in the late 1790s in the early Sydney colony. Despite Schuchardt’s early work and enormous amounts of descriptive and comparative work since, the theoretical literature on the origins and development of Creoles has remained largely Atlantic-focussed, although Siegel (2008) is one notable exception. The aim of this column is to suggest that Melanesian and Australian Creoles have valuable contributions to make to some of the debates which have preoccupied Creolists over the last two decades.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2004

Loss and Renewal, 2016

This volume is the first collection of research dedicated to the effects of recent language contact processes on Australian languages. Multilingualism and language contact have always been pervasive in Australia (Bowern & Koch 2004; Koch 1997; McConvell & Bowern 2011), but have often been discussed in the context of identifying genetic relationships between languages. At the time of British colonisation, there were approximately 250 languages spoken in Australia, many with several dialects. Colonisation brought the extensive diffusion of English and with it a dramatically different configuration of languages in contact, including the emergence of pidgins, creoles and mixed languages and a range of English-lexified varieties and dialects, such as Aboriginal English. Now relatively few traditional languages are spoken day-today or are being transmitted to children. Yet notions of simplification and loss do not adequately capture the complexity and dynamics of the contemporary contexts. Indigenous people have developed complex linguistic repertoires, often including other traditional languages and varieties of English and/or Kriol (an English-lexified creole), or a mixed language. Many of the contact languages co-existed for periods of time with traditional languages, and in some cases, still do, raising questions of continuing and bidirectional contact influences. Indigenous speakers have shifted, or are shifting away from traditional languages in many locations, but in some places traditional languages remain the primary languages spoken, with English or Kriol included in speakers' repertoires. These constantly evolving scenarios raise questions of what kinds of language contact mechanisms and outcomes are at play in contemporary language-in-use, and this volume collates research at the vanguard of that exploration. The research presented in this volume marks a new era of linguistic work on Australian languages. The last 40 years have seen a concerted effort to describe traditional Australian languages rather than contact varieties. The focus is largely the result of the urgency of documenting these endangered languages. However, in the 1970s through to the mid-1980s, attention was given to the English-based pidgin and Kriol. The pidgin developed in the Sydney colony and diffused into the Pacific and northern Australia, and transformed into north Australian Kriol, that developed as a result of interactions between speakers of the pidgin, traditional languages and English. The interest in Australian pidgin Australian language contact in historical and synchronic perspective

The recent publication of the first two volumes of John and Joy Sandefur's projected trilogy on Ngukurr-Bamyili Creole is an event of great importance fqr Australian linguistics and for pidgin/creole stndies in general. Every linguist who has done fieldwork on Aboriginal languages in the Northern Territory.and/or northern Western Australia knows that Aborigines there command various forms of non-standard English, including - especially among younger people - a full-blown English-based creole. Yet until recently, the very existence of Australian creoles was - outside of Northern Australia - a well-kept secret. The volume of publication on them is still tiny in comparison to the now-sizable body of works on traditional Aboriginal languages. But with the publication of these two volumes, we now have for the first time a detailed account of the segmental phonology, lexicon, and aspects of the grammar of one of those creoles (with other grammatical aspects, including complex sentences; to be treated in the third volume). As with most of the existing literature on Australian pidgins/creoles the Sande furs’ aims are practical and descriptive, not theoretical. My purpose here is to supplement their account with some observations based on my own field experience with the same creole , and on analysis of published texts, and to draw out some of their implications for pidgin-creole studies and for linguistic theory more generally.

This chapter provides a lexical-semantic comparison of a selection of Englishes and English-related creoles in the Australia-Pacific area. Faced with the conundrum in sociolinguistic classificatory practice and its contested categories: "language", "creole", "dialect", "variety", and "English(es)", we will attempt to circumvent the problematic of metavocabulary by taking a new, two-pronged approach. Firstly, we rely on semantic primes, simple words meanings such as I, you, people, body, big, small, know, think, see, hear as our comparandum, and compare and contrast the lexicalizations of these basic meanings across our sample. Secondly, we utilize phylogenetic networks for visualizing our results and as a tool for forming new hypotheses. Our results provide counter-evidence to the claim that Melanesian and Australian creoles are "varieties of English". In our sample, we find three basic types of relations. "Shared-core" types (Australian English v. New Zealand English); "closely related core" types (Hawai'i Creole v. Anglo Englishes); and "distantly related core" types (Tok Pisin v. Anglo English, Kriol v. Anglo English, or Yumplatok v. Anglo English). We measure our results against Scandinavian languages in order to explore the language-dialect question, and against Trinidadian -a Caribbean creole, in order to explore the extent of lexical-semantic areality. We conclude that current sociolinguistic metavocabulary is inadequate for representing the complexity of the new ways of speaking in the Australia-Pacific region, and we suggest a principled arealsemantic investigation of words based on semantic principles.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages, 1998

This paper discusses evidence of an early pidgin in use amongst Aboriginal people of the north west coast of Western Australia. The crucial evidence comes from an

Approaches to Language and Culture

In this chapter we identify prominent strands of current research on language and culture in Australia and Oceania. The themes are: 1. Australia's remarkably elaborate systems of kin classification, and some new developments in the study of them; 2. multilingualism in Indigenous Australia, the complex patterns of alternation among the languages in the course of people's everyday interaction, and their significance for questions of social and territorial identity; 3. the emergence of more collaborative approaches to producing, storing and accessing Indigenous digital heritage; 4. new studies of Indigenous Australian children's language socialization, and the associated rise of new languages resulting from interactions between northern Australian creole English (Kriol) and Indigenous languages; 5. new studies of children's language socialization in various parts of Oceania and the relation between their findings and those of other anthropological studies there; 6. the political effects of language ideologies across multiple scales of interaction in the Solomon Islands, Tokelau and Papua New Guinea; 7. practices of translation in Christianity within Oceania, and the ways in which the process of translation models other kinds of transformation; 8. the rise of new media and communication technologies in Oceania, and studies of the social changes prompted by and reflected in their use. The new work on these topics is notable for the way in which it draws on long traditions of close attention to language's imbrication with culture, and points to new directions for research.

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.