Deadly Reckoning: Changes in Gurindji Children’s Knowledge of Cardinals^*

* This study was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program (ELDP) under grant IPF0134 (C.I. Meakins) held through the University of Manchester; and by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language under grant CE140100041.

Abstract

Dramatic language change has been underway among Gurindji people since European colonization. One major shift has occurred in the use of cardinal directions (N–S–E–W) to express spatial relations. Where older Gurindji adults use 28 inflected forms for each cardinal to describe large and small-scale space, young adults use four forms and only for large-scale space. This paper examines Gurindji children’s knowledge of cardinals to determine whether this change is continuing or has stabilized. The ‘Which-way-is’ task was devised and administered to 53 children and 56 adults. While adults gave 95% correct responses, children gave fewer correct responses (50%) and showed no significant improvement across age groups, although their ability to give a correct response improved significantly if they were asked to point to a location rather than to name the cardinal (78%). These results are interpreted as indicative of loss in the knowledge of the cardinal system rather than an extended acquisition period. However we argue that it is overly simplistic to analyse these results solely in terms of obsolescence. Children gave significantly more correct responses on the east/west axis which suggests continuing attention to geocentric cues but that a transformation in the expression of spatial relations is underway.

Keywords:

• Gurindji
• Spatial Relations
• Cardinal Directions
• Language Change
• Language Shift

ORCID

Felicity Meakins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4487-4351

Notes

* This study was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program (ELDP) under grant IPF0134 (C.I. Meakins) held through the University of Manchester; and by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language under grant CE140100041.

1 Gurindji does not make use of the relative frame of reference, in that fixed bearings are never expressed in terms of the ego, i.e. ‘left’ and ‘right’. Although, left/right terms exist, they describe a person’s handedness and are not extended to specify the location of objects in relation to ego. Even where the sides of a human body are differentiated, cardinal terms are used, as shown in example (6). An intrinsic frame of reference is also used but only when a ground has inherent facets, such as a house or car. It will not be discussed further in this paper. See Meakins (2011b) for further discussion.

2 The river drainage terms will not be discussed any further because the use of these terms is restricted to discussions of places and journeys where a water course is salient. For a full description of these systems see Meakins (2011b: 53–57).

3 Note that the locative on examples (1) and (5) and ablative on example (6) are additional agreement markers and are not included in the inflectional paradigm for cardinals.

4 Note that the only significant difference was seen between participants who had a tertiary-level Western education and those who did not. Both Gurindji and Gurindji Kriol speakers with a tertiary education gave significantly more ‘viewpoint dependent’ responses which Meakins et al. (2016) argue is the result of greater exposure to English and literacy practices, and therefore the availability of an additional spatial description system.

5 In retrospect, this part of the task could have been better designed with a better balance of directions. When the places were chosen, more attention was given to degree of community knowledge than direction.

6 Source: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glm2/glm2.pdf.

7 This corpus was collected and transcribed in CLAN by Felicity Meakins with the extensive assistance of Samantha Smiler, a Gurindji field assistant. The collection of this corpus was funded by the Aboriginal Child Language (ACLA) project (Australian Research Council DP0343189, C.I. Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson) through the University of Melbourne. Annotation of the corpus was undertaken by the 2014–15 UQ Summer Research Program participants Jackie van den Boss, Hannah Choi, Jessica Solla and Sasha Wilmoth.

8 The command <mlu @ +d> produced a spreadsheet where utterances were counted by speaker in each file. These were added together.

9 The command <kwal +s"@r-*,|-adv:loc,o-%" @ +d4> was used in the CLAN-formatted database to extract all instances of directional terms in the child-directed speech corpus.

10 A simple binary relationship would be expressed by a locative, e.g. windou-ngka ‘window-LOC’ etc.