An Introduction to ‘Studies in Australian Indigenous Conversation’

In this issue we bring together for the first time a collection of papers which use microanalysis to examine Aboriginal conversations. They were originally presented at a panel on talk-in-interaction in Indigenous communities at the 11th International Pragmatics Conference held at the University of Melbourne in July 2009. All the papers—the first four in this issue—are distinctive in using a Conversation Analytic (CA) approach to studying interaction. Since Moerman's study of Thai and Lue talk in Northern Thailand, for which the field work was carried out in the 1960s, and which was published in 1988, there has indeed been very little CA work on small Indigenous languages anywhere in the world. It is only in recent years that the lens of CA has been applied to Australian Indigenous conversation, mainly by the authors represented in this collection. Blythe is a relatively recent PhD graduate whose thesis from Sydney University was on person reference in Murriny-Patha (Blythe 2009). Rendle-Short, one of Australia's leading CA scholars, has only recently turned her attention to Indigenous interaction. Her co-author, Karin Moses, is another recent PhD graduate from the University of Melbourne (Moses 2009), who has extensive experience in Indigenous education in the Northern Territory. She notes how little we know about Aboriginal language use, especially with young children. Mushin has over 10 years’ experience of linguistic field work in the Northern Territory, and in recent years has collaborated with Gardner, a pioneer of Australian Conversation Analysis, to study aspects of conversational interaction in Garrwa (Gardner & Mushin 2007; Mushin & Gardner 2009).

Whilst this work is new, it is indebted to earlier sociolinguistic and discourse studies of Aboriginal languages. Michael Walsh's ethnographic work has alerted us to aspects of conversational style, such as multi-addressee ‘broadcast talk’, and the non-dyadic and continuous nature of Indigenous conversation, in which talk is directed to ‘no particular individual and there need not be any direct response’ (Walsh 1991), and in which extended silences are the norm. This last point is also made by Diana Eades (e.g. Eades 2000), who has worked particularly on legal settings. She also notes that there appears to be no obligation for an addressee to answer questions. Kenneth Liberman used ethnomethodology in his study of conversation in Pitjantjatjara (Liberman 1985), and likewise noted differences in the conversational style of these speakers, such as that interruptions were common, which is in harmony with Walsh's notions of non-dyadic and continuous talk. Ian Malcolm is another Australian linguist who has investigated sociolinguistic differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian language, noting especially the consequences for Indigenous education (e.g. Kaldor & Malcolm 1985). His colleague, Farzad Sharifian (e.g. 2001) has also produced work of a more cognitive nature on Aboriginal discourse, again with a focus on Indigenous education. Finally, Murray Garde's long-term ethnographic study on Bininj Kun-wok (Garde 2002) was, like the study by Blythe, a study of person reference, with a focus on social deixis, drawing on actual language use rather than grammatical notions of person reference.

The four papers here take the discourse and ethnographic work of the authors mentioned above, and push down to a fine-grained analysis of Indigenous interactional practices. Rendle-Short and Moses examine how two pre-school Indigenous children respond to requests from their adult caregivers, and how they monitor the adults’ talk. They challenge the claims that Aboriginal children resist answering questions, or even ask very few questions themselves (cf. Moses 2009), and show that these children and their caregivers do orient to requests, and pursue them if they do not have an immediate response. Their second finding is that the children monitor the talk of caregivers and time the start of their own turns to come in at a point of completion of the adult turns, rather than talking over them.

Gardner's paper also examines questions and answers, though this time information seeking ones rather than requests. His aim is to investigate the claims that Indigenous Australians ask fewer direct questions, and often do not answer questions. With a collection of 62 questions and their responses, he finds that a large majority do receive responses, though interestingly, when compared with a large study of questions in 10 languages (Stivers et al. 2010), the proportion of questions that these Garrwa speakers did not answer was at the highest end (along with Lao) of the 10 languages, and the average delays in answering when answers did come was longer than for any of the 10 languages, suggesting that questions and answers are normal in the language, though regularly questions are not answered, and the tolerance for silence between question and answer appears to be high compared with other cultures.

Blythe pursues an aspect arising from his PhD work, namely a particular way of referring to people that appears to be strongly preferred in Murriny-Patha, namely self-association, that is, associating the person being referred to with the participants in the conversation, most regularly through triangulation. In particular, the speakers draw on kinship to do this (e.g. this bloke's cousin). It appears that some features of Aboriginal culture are significant in this preference, such as taboos on naming the deceased, some affinals, and opposite sex siblings or cousins, which leads to a relatively low occurrence of direct naming, and a relatively high occurrence of these self-association forms.

In the final paper in the collection, Mushin investigates code-switching in Garrwa–Kriol conversations. Her perspective takes code-switching as an interactional resource, rather than, for example, as domain-related, situational, or relating to social identity. Whilst granting that these may be factors that drive code-switching, she finds in her data that speakers regularly code-switch to achieve particular interactive purposes, such as time shifts in storytelling, shifting from direct to reported speech, or shifts in activity types.

We are only beginning to discover how Indigenous conversational practices work in the local, moment-by-moment unfolding of talk. What is beginning to emerge, we believe, is that there is a bedrock of such practices which is recognizable from a Western, European perspective: we can recognize turns being taken in an orderly fashion, familiar actions such as questions and answers emerging in familiar sequences, people being referred to in familiar ways. What seems to be simultaneously emerging from this work is that there are differences in which practices are preferred or in the timing and pacing of talk. We now have a few studies which describe in detail some features of Indigenous conversation that those who have worked closely with Indigenous communities for many years have noticed; but we still have a long way to go.

In addition to the contributors, we would like to thank all of the participants and audience of the 2009 IPrA panel who provided the impetus for this issue. We would also like to thank Keith Allan, AJL editor, for his support for this special issue, and all of the reviewers who took the time to help raise the standard. We hope this issue will stimulate further discussion and study of conversation in Australian Indigenous contexts.