Comparing Vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: Citation Speech Data

Abstract

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words relative to their English cognates, by comparing picture-prompted citation speech from five young Gurindji Kriol speaking women and four young Australian English speaking women from Katherine, the nearest town. The results indicate systematic differences in vowel pronunciation and vowel variability between Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English, in monophthongs and diphthongs. We also consider the vowel variation in these tokens in the context of the likely vowel phoneme inventory in Gurindji Kriol, or the extent of permitted within-category variation in the languages.

Keywords:

• Vowels
• Gurindji Kriol
• Australian English
• Kriol
• Mixed Languages

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and thank the speakers of Gurindji Kriol who participated in the study and would like that made public: Cassandra Algy, Anne-Maree Reynolds, Leanne Smiler, Lisa Smiler, Rosie Smiler. We also gratefully acknowledge the participation of speakers of Katherine English. We acknowledge and thank the community leaders at Kalkaringi and Daguragu for supporting this research. We thank the Katherine town services, local businesses and organizations for their assistance in locating speakers of Katherine English. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and constructive comments on this article. For feedback on our analysis we also thank the audience at the OzPhon workshop, held as part of the Human Communication Science (HCSNet) Summerfest at the University of New South Wales, December 2009. The research was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0985395 ‘Phonological development in child speakers of mixed language’ (2009–2012) to Caroline Jones

Notes

¹The Aboriginal Child Language project (2003–2007) was funded by ARC grant DP0343189 through the University of Melbourne (C.I. Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson and Patrick McConvell).

²We thank an anonymous reviewer for these specific suggestions about coarticulatory effects.