https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4487-4351
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ABSTRACT
We discuss two unrelated languages, Jingulu (Mirndi, non-Pama-Nyungan) and Mudburra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan), which have been in contact for 200–500 years. The language contact situation is unusual cross-linguistically due to the high number of shared nouns, tending to an almost shared noun lexicon. Even more unusually, this lexicon was formed by borrowing in both directions at a relatively equal rate. The aim of this paper is to extend the bidirectional noun borrowing results to the verbal systems of Jingulu and Mudburra to determine whether a similarly high rate of borrowing occurred, and if so, whether it was similarly bidirectional. The high degree of shared Jingulu–Mudburra verb forms was first observed by Pensalfini who claimed that Jingulu and Mudburra lexical verbs are almost entirely cognate across these two languages. This paper aims to quantify the degree of shared verb forms and determine the direction of borrowing between Mudburra and Jingulu. We first establish shared forms and then determine the origins of the forms based on a comparative database of verbs from geographic and phylogenetic neighbours (Wambaya, Gurindji and Jaminjung).
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the Australian Linguistics Society conference (11–13 December 2019). The work was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP150101201, 2015-2019, CI Meakins and Pensalfini). Thanks to Rachel Nordlinger, Eva Schultze-Berndt, Jane Simpson, Joe Blythe and David Nash for sharing their respective unpublished Wambaya, Jaminjung, Warumungu, Jaru and Warlmanpa lexical databases. Many thanks to Joe Blythe, Mark Harvey and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback. We also appreciate the work of Liam McCullough, Thomas Bott, Bodean Sloan and Ras Kingdon who coded the Wambaya, Jaminjung, Gurindji, Mudburra and Jingulu data; and Claire Gourlay who coded some of the code-switching data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Felicity Meakins is an ARC Future Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Queensland and a CI in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She is a field linguist who specializes in the documentation of Australian Indigenous languages in the Northern Territory and the effect of English on Indigenous languages. She has worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalization programmes, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into Indigenous languages. She has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars of traditional Indigenous languages and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia.
Rob Pensalfini received his PhD in theoretical linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, with research based on his fieldwork in the Barkly Tableland of Australia’s Northern Territory. He then worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago for two years prior to commencing as a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Queensland in 1999. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Drama in 2003, and to Associate Professor in 2016. He has published several books and numerous articles in both linguistics and drama, including both descriptive and theoretical works on Australian languages, and ground-breaking work on the performance of Shakespeare in prisons. He leads Australia’s only ongoing Prison Shakespeare programme and is the Artistic Director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble.
Caitlin Zipf holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and English from the University of Queensland.
Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway studies language contact, language structure and the interactions between them. Her research interests also include lexicography, language maintenance and resource creation for minority languages. She currently works closely with speakers of Mudburra, a language of the Northern Territory, but has also worked with Indigenous language speakers in Western Australia’s Pilbara region and on the islands of Alor and Pantar in eastern Indonesia. Amanda is currently a PhD student at the University of Queensland and in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.
Notes
1 Mudburra and Jingulu people talk about how Mudburra people came to the region, but the timing of and reason for this event are largely unknown. Because cognate forms in the two languages are largely identical with no phonological processes, etc. required to establish cognacy, we surmise that the timing must have been relatively recent.
2 Note that the existence of proto-Australian is highly controversial (Koch Citation2014), but see a recent paper arguing for its existence (Harvey & Mailhammer Citation201Citation7).
3 Pensalfini was not using the word ‘cognate’ in the sense of ‘having a common genetic ancestor’ as used in Historical Linguistics, but (arguably inaccurately) as indicating that the forms came from one source while being agnostic as to whether that source was inheritance or borrowing.
4 Black (Citation2007: 67) finds that Jingulu shares 40–43% of a sample of basic nouns with Mudburra, based on a set of 114 Jingulu vocabulary items recorded by Chadwick (Citation1975). This number is probably lower because Black attempts to separate established Mudburra borrowings from more recent language obsolescence effects.
5 Glossing abbreviations: AUX=auxiliary, ABL=ablative, AWY=away, DECL=declarative, DIS=discourse, DIST=distal, dl=dual, EX=exclusive, FOC=focus, IMP=imperative, IPFV=imperfective, Inc=inclusive, LIG=ligature, LOC=locative case, n=neuter gender, NEG=negative, NMLZ=nominalizer, NOM=nominative case, NS=non-subject, pl=plural, poss=possessive, POT=potential, PROX=proximal, PRS=present, RSTR=restricted, SJB=subject, SBJV=subjunctive, sg=singular, TOP=topic, TWD=towards, 1=first person, 2=second person, 3=third person.
6 The endings -nini and -nganini are Mudburra verb inflections which we are not glossing here for simplicity’s sake.
7 Mark Harvey (per. comm.) also suggests that Jingulu and Mudburra might share a word because they had each independently acquired it from a third source. In the case of one of the forms, dirrk ‘tie up’ is found in both Wardaman dirrgba and Wagiman dirrk as well as Jaminjung and Gurindji. Both Jingulu and Mudburra might independently have acquired it from Wardaman. We note however that Wardaman is not contiguous with Jingulu or Mudburra, so it seems more likely that it was borrowed into Gurindji from Jaminjung, and then into Mudburra and Jingulu.
8 Dashes refer to the fact that the data are irrelevant to the hypothesis.
9 Note that different Australian languages have different orthographic conventions for the stop series, however there is no voicing distinction in these languages, therefore \b, d, g\ represent the same stops as \p, t, k\.
10 We also searched through the Warlmanpa dictionary; however, matches are inconclusive because Warlmanpa has been in contact with Mudburra and Jingulu for a long time. In this respect, it is difficult to differentiate inheritance from borrowing.
11 These examples come from the Wikipedia Denglisch page <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denglisch>.
12 Thank you to Claire Gourlay for these examples.
13 The fact that grow here is in the coverbal root slot and not the preverb position is shown by the absence of an overt third person singular marker prefixed to the light verb -marriyimi. Third person singular subjects are null only if there is a coverbal root present. Otherwise 3sg is marked by ka- if preceded by a preverb, and ya- elsewhere. This demonstrates that coverbal roots are synchronically an open class in Jingulu, despite the fact that many Kriol and English words appear as preverbs. Putting grow in the coverb slot may be facilitated by the fact that it is vowel-final, and therefore requires no linking vowel to connect to the light verb.
14 Joe Blythe (per. comm.) posits a situation of receptive multilingualism (cf. Singer Citation2018), which may well have been the norm throughout much of Australia. In this scenario, bilingual conversations would consist of Mudburra people speaking Mudburra (predominantly) and Jingili people speaking Jingulu (predominantly). Accommodation of an addressee, in the context of receptive multilingualism, might constitute borrowing some of their lexical items: nouns, verbs, interjections, whilst largely retaining your own grammar.