Linguistic aspects of Australian Aboriginal English

Abstract

It is probable that the majority of the 455 000 strong Aboriginal population of Australia speak some form of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) at least some of the time and that it is the first (and only) language of many Aboriginal children. This means their language is somewhere on a continuum ranging from something very close to Standard Australian English (SAE) at one end, through to something very close to creole at the other. The phonetics and phonology, grammar, and lexicon of AAE are influenced to varying degrees by the Australian Aboriginal language substrate. There are also some features typical of non‐standard Englishes in general, and some which have been retained from earlier forms of the colonial language. Many teachers still see this variety as an uneducated or corrupted form of Standard Australian English, rather than as a different dialect of English that is just as efficient a medium of communication.

• Australian Aboriginal languages
• Australian creoles
• Australian Aboriginal English

Notes

1. Symbols used here for the phonemic transcription of SAE are those currently used by most academic researchers and teachers in Australia, often referred to as the ‘HCE’ symbols (Harrington, Cox, and Evans 1997; Cox and Palethorpe, 2007), and also recommended for clinical use (Cox, 2008).

2. This lack of voicing distinction may transfer into the written medium, as in the case of the legendary Alice Springs graffito: ‘Neville is a brick’.

3. In most acrolectal varieties of AAE, however, as in many other non‐standard accents of English, ‘ask’ is typically [ᵄks].

4. In fact some indigenous languages, especially in the north, have sequences such as /ᵓj/ and /ᵄj/, which are phonetically quite similar to the corresponding SAE diphthongs.

5. This word thus retains the stress pattern, of the original indigenous (Guugu Yimidhirr) word /ˈkᵄᵑᶷrᶷ/.

6. These terms are used in the technical sense of diagnostic voice evaluation (e.g. Hirano, 1981; Oates and Russell, 1998).

7. Note that examples such as ‘Where you live?’ and ‘What you got?’ (Eagleson et al., 1982: 94) are not particularly good evidence for lack of auxiliary fronting, since there are no auxiliaries in the underlying forms in AAE.

8. Possibly through the influence of Torres Strait creole.

9. i.e. the children of exactly those relatives who may be referred to as mother or father ( = mother's sisters or father's brothers).

10. The former term was coined by Frank Gillen (see Spencer, 1896) as a translation into SAE of the Arrernte (central Australia) word altyerre [ᵄlˈᵄrᵄ] It has an equivalent in many indigenous languages (e.g. tjukurrpa [ˈᶷkᶷrpᵄ] in Warlpiri and Western Desert), but by no means in all. It has subsequently passed into AAE.

11. Since these categories were based on teachers' judgements, it might be safer to interpret the term ‘English’ as ‘more acrolectal AAE’ and the term ‘Aboriginal English’ as ‘more basilectal AAE’.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.