LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA
Edited by
Michael Walsh and Colin Yallop

ABORIGINAL
STUDIES
-
W PRESS
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1993 BY
Aboriginal Studies Press
for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601.
Reprinted 2005, Reprinted 2007
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not
necessarily those of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies.

1 MICHAEL WALSH AND COLIN YALLOP 1993.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication
may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission
of the publisher.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA:

Walsh, Michael and Colin Yallop (eds)
Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia

Includes Bibliographies.
ISBN-10 0 85575 241 6.
ISBN-13 978 0 85575 241 5

[l].Aboriginies, Australian - Languages. [2]. Aborigines, Australia - Lan-

guages - Social aspects. [3]. Intercultural communication - Australia.
I. Walsh, Michael, 1948- 11. Yallop, Colin.
CONTENTS

Notes on Linguistic Conventions vii

Preface Michael Walsh and Colin Yallop xviI
1 Languages and Their Status in Aboriginal Australia 1
Michael Walsh
2 The Structure of Australian Aboriginal Languages 15
Colin Yallop
3 Language Contact in Early Colonial New South Wales 1788 to 1791 33
Jakelin Troy
4 Tasmanian Aboriginal Language: Old and New Identities 51
Terry Crowley
5 Bundjalung: Teaching a Disappearing Language 73
Margaret Sharpe
6 Language and Culture: Socialisation in a Warlpiri Community 85
Edith Bavin
7 Out-of-the-ordinary Ways of Using a Language 97
Barry Alpher
8 Classifying the World in a n Aboriginal Language 107
Michael Walsh
9 Making Dictionaries 123
June Sirnpson
10 Losing and Gaining a Language: the Story of Kriol 145
in the Northern Territory
John Harris
11 Kriol: the Creation of a Written Language and a Tool of Colonisation 155
Mari Rhydwen
12 The Language of Oppression: the Bolden Case, Victoria 1845 169
Michael Christie
13 Language and the Law: White Australia v Nancy 181
Diana Eades
14 Language and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia 191
Alan Rumsey
15 New Uses for Old Languages 207
Paul Black
Contributors 224
NOTES ON LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS vii

NOTES ON LINGUISTIC
CONVENTIONS

SYMBOLS USED IN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

This list gives a rough guide to the pronunciation of letters and combinations of
letters in Aboriginal languages. The English equivalents do not indicate the
pronunciation accurately but give approximations which should be acceptable for
most purposes. The list does not include letters whose values can be safely
predicted from English conventions, such as I and m.

The references are to the notes following the list.

as in English 'spa', not as in 'tame' - see 1.1
a long version of 'a' as in English 'spa' - see 1.2
used in Yolngu (NE Arnhem Land) for long a: - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing a: - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing a: - see 1.2
the international phonetic symbol for a voiced bilabial fricative
(Spanish 'v');
rare in Australian languages - see 2.7
as in English 'chip' - see 2.2.2, 2.2.5
as in English 'this' - see 2.2.4, 2.2.5
as in English 'jam' - see 2.2.2, 2.2.5
used in Yolngu (NE Arnhem Land) for long i: - see 1.2;
elsewhere more or less as 'e' in 'bet'
the international phonetic symbol for a voiced velar fricative
(Spanish g in digo or luego);
rare in Australian languages - see 2.7
as in English 'pit' - see 1.1
a long version of 'i' as in 'machine', not as in 'dine' - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing i: - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing i: - see 1.2
as in English 'jam' - see 2.2.2, 2.2.5
a dental '1' with the blade of the tongue against the teeth -see 2.4
a palatal 'l', as in Italian g1 or Spanish l1 - see 2.4;
for a rough approximation pronounce as 'Hi' in 'million'
the international phonetic symbol for 'ng' as in 'sing'
as in 'sing' or 'singer', not as in 'finger' - see 2.3.1
a dental 'n' with the blade of the tongue against the teeth - see
2.3.2
 ...
vlll LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

a palatal 'n', as in Italian gn or Spanish fi - see 2.3.2;

for a rough approximation pronounce as 'ni' in 'opinion'
used in Yolngu (NE Arnhem Land) for a long U: - see 1.2;
elsewhere more or less '0' as in 'note'
as in Australian English, but pronounced also when final, as in
American pronunciation of 'car' or 'door' - see 2.6 and see
also the letter combinations rd rl rn rr rt
in some languages a retroflex 'd' with the tip of the tongue against
the roof of the mouth - see 2.2.3, 2.2.5;
in Warlpiri a retroflex flap - see 2.6
a retroflex 'l', with the tip of the tongue against the roof of the
mouth - see 2.4
a retroflex 'n', with the tip of the tongue against the roof of
the mouth - see 2.3.2
a trilled or flapped 'r', as in Scottish English or Italian - see 2.6
a retroflex 't', with the tip of the tongue against the roof of
the mouth - see 2.2.3, 2.2.5
as in English 'thin' - see 2.2.4, 2.2.5
as in English 'chip' - see 2.2.2, 2.2.5
as in 'put' - see 1.1
a long version of 'U' as in 'Sue', not as in 'cue' - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing U: - see 1.2
an alternative way of writing U: - see 1.2

NOTES ON THE PRONUNCIATIONAND SPELLING OF AUSTRALIAN

LANGUAGES
1 Vowels
1.1 Simple Vowel Sounds
The vowels of Australian Aboriginal languages are more like those of Italian or
Spanish than English. In the spelling of languages, vowel letters usually have
'continental European' values rather than English values: i is more like the i of
'machine' or 'kiwi' and not a t all like the i of 'time' or 'dine'; a is more like the
a of 'spa', not the a of 'tame'; and u is more like the vowel of 'Sue' and 'two', not
as in 'cue' or 'pure'. Thus, for example, the Guugu Yimidhirr words bayan 'house',
dumbi 'smashed' and yiyi 'this' (quoted in chapter 2) sound more or less as if
pronounced in Spanish or Italian: the first syllable of bayan sounds more like
NOTES ON LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS ix

English 'bah' than 'bay', and the second syllable would rhyme with English 'bun'
rather than 'ban'; the first syllable of dumbi is more like English 'doom' than
'dumb', the second more 'be' than 'by'; and yiyi sounds more like 'kiwi' than 'hi-fi'.
In some cases, however, the spelling of Aboriginal words does reflect
English spelling. In chapter 5, Sharpe points out that the spelling of the New South
Wales language Bundjalung follows English spelling conventions. And of course
many Australian placenames were not only written down according to English
spelling conventions but were also adapted in pronunciation. As Troy mentions
in chapter 3, the Sydney place name Woolloomooloo was originally written down
as Walla-moo1 which, if written in a modern Aboriginal orthography, would
probably be Walamul. Both the spelling and the pronunciation have shifted away
from this original form.
1.2 Long and Short Vowels
In many Aboriginal languages there is a difference between long and short vowels.
The long vowels are sometimes written as double letters (G, m,u u ) or occasionally
with a following h (ih, ah, uh). In the Yolngu language (NE Arnhem Land), long
ii is written e, long aa as a, and long u u as o. It is important to note here that
different spellings do not necessarily mean different pronunciations: the vowel
sound that is written ii in one language, i h in another and e in another is more
or less the same sound.
To avoid the problems of constantly trying to explain sounds in terms
of various spelling systems, linguists sometimes use standardised phonetic symbols,
enclosed in square brackets. In the International Phonetic Alphabet [i], [a] and
[U] represent the three basic vowels of most Australian languages and their

lengthened counterparts are represented as [i:], [a:] and [U:].In this book you will
only occasionally find such phonetic symbols. But note that in chapter 9 Simpson
gives some Latin words in which vowel length is indicated by the colon (for example,
gl0:ssa).
1.3 Stress Patterns
The stress pattern of Australian language is in most cases rather more even than
in English. In particular, it is not common to reduce unstressed syllables in the
way that English does (as in, say, 'believe' or 'police', where the first syllable may
almost disappear, leaving a monosyllabic 'blieve' or 'plice'). Once again, most
Australian languages are more like Spanish or Italian, in which unstressed syllables
still have their full vowel sounds. But there are exceptions, Bundjalung (chapter
5 ) being one.
X LANGUAGE A N D CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

2 Consonants
2.1 Types of Consonant
The kinds of consonant sound found in Australian languages are not radically
different from English: there are plosive consonants (like English p, t, k, h, d, g),
nasal consonants (like m and n), lateral consonants (like l) and semivowels ( W ,
and y). English also has fricative consonants (such as f and S) and affricates (ch
as in 'church' a n d j as in 'jam'), but these sounds are rare in Australia and totally
absent from many of the languages. On the other hand, Australian languages have
r-sounds of a kind not found in English.
Within these categories of consonant, there are important differences
between English and Australian languages, and we shall look at each category
in turn.
2.2 Plosive Consonants
2.2.1 p b t d k g
The six plosive consonants of English are made in three positions or gestures of
the speech organs. p and b are bilabial, involving a brief closure of the lips; t and
d are alveolar, involving a brief closure of the tongue tip against the gum-ridge
behind the upper teeth; and k and g are velar, involving a brief closure of the
back of the tongue against the soft palate. The plosives p t k are voiceless, b d
g are voiced, the difference being that during a voiced plosive, the vocal folds
in the larynx are vibrating as air passes up through them from the lungs; in a
voiceless plosive the vocal folds are further apart allowing air to pass more freely.
If you have never studied speech sounds before, test what we have just said by
listening to and feeling your articulation of the following six words, each of which
contains a plosive between vowels: happy, abbey, fatty, paddy, tacky, baggy.
2.2.2 Palatal Plosives (eh tjj dj)
Most Australian languages have more than the three positions of English plosives.
All of them have a n additional position in which the blade of the tongue makes
contact with the hard palate. A plosive made in this way sounds similar to English
ch or j, and is often written as eh, j or tj,but the Aboriginal sound is made with
the blade of the tongue in a single gesture, whereas the typical articulation of
English ch or j is not one single gesture but begins with the tip of the tongue against
the gum ridge and then moves through a fricative release. The Aboriginal sound
is normally described as a palatal plosive.
2.2.3 Retroflex Plosives (rt rd)
Some Aboriginal languages also have a plosive in which the tip of the tongue is
raised towards the hard palate and sometimes even curled back so that the
NOTES ON LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS xi

underside of the tongue tip touches the roof of the mouth. Most English speakers
perceive this plosive as having an r-sound before it. This is not an accurate
perception, but the plosive is commonly written as r t or rd, occasionally as a t
or d with some additional marking such as a dot or a line beneath the letter. The
sound is normally described as a retroflex plosive.
2.2.4 Lamino-dental Plosives (th dh)
A minority of Aboriginal languages have yet another place of articulation, one
in which the tongue is pushed well forward in the mouth so that the blade of the
tongue makes contact with the back of the teeth. The nearest sound in English
is a dental fricative (voiceless as in 'thin' or voiced as in 'then') but the Aboriginal
sound is a plosive (like t)not a fricative. The Aboriginal sound is commonly written
as th or d h and described as a dental plosive, or more precisely as a lamino-dental
plosive to indicate that the blade of the tongue is involved. Thus all Australian
languages have four different positions for the articulation of plosive consonants
and some have as many as six.

2.2.5 Voiced and Voiceless Plosives

Some Australian languages have - like English - the distinction between voiced
and voiceless plosives. For these languages it is important to distinguish between
p and b, t h and dh, and so on. But most Australian languages do not have this
distinction: there is only one bilabial plosive sound, which may in fact be
pronounced like p in some circumstances (say at the beginning of words) and like
b in others (say in the middle of words). For speakers of these languages the
variation between p and b is not significant. This is the same phenomenon that
occurs in English with sounds l and r. Most English speakers pronounce these
sounds differently in different positions: compare the l in 'leap' and 'table' or the
r in 'reap', 'tree', 'dream' and 'three'. Just as English speakers will count variant
Is or rs as versions of one sound, so Aboriginal speakers may count p and b (and
t and d and so on) as variants of a single sound.
2.3 Nasal Consonants
2.3.1 The Velar Nasal (rig)

Nasal consonants such as m and n are common in Australian languages. There

are two particular problems for English speakers. The first is that the velar nasal,
usually written ng, is limited in its occurrence in English: it occurs in words like
'sing', 'long', 'hanger', but never at the beginning of a word or syllable. In fact,
English speakers mostly have difficulty in pronouncing an initial rig, and they often
simplify foreign names such as Ngaio or Nguyen by pronouncing them with an
initial n.In Australian languages, words commonly do begin with ng,for example
xii LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

the widespread word ngali meaning 'you and 1'. If you want to pronounce this
word correctly, try detaching the ng from the end of a word: for example try saying
'sing ah lee', then run the syllables together and repeat the sequence several times
before trying to make it sound like 'sing-ngah-lee'.
Avoid inserting a g plosive sound. There is a clear difference in English
pronunciation between the single ng sound of 'singer', 'ringer' and the ng of
'finger', 'linger'. But, given that we write ng in both cases, it is understandable
that people are sometimes confused, for example, about how to pronounce the
ng in 'Singapore'. The difference is important in Australian languages and is usually
shown in the spelling: in reading Aboriginal material, assume that ng is the velar
nasal (as in 'singer') and that the nasal plus stop (as in 'finger') will be written
as nag.
English spelling is not very helpful here. We've just seen that the
spelling ng is ambiguous, and we should also note that the velar nasal is written
as n in words like 'sink' and 'bank'. From the spelling of an English word like
incorporate' we can't tell whether the n is pronounced as n or ng (and it probably
doesn't matter to most people). In Australian languages, however, it may be
necessary to distinguish carefully between words like rinka (pronounced with
n-k) and ringka. In the spelling of some languages, an apostrophe may be used
to make it clear that n not ng is intended (as in rin'ka). And for even greater clarity,
some transcriptions use the phonetic symbol [ y 1, called 'eng'.
2.3.2 Nasal Consonants Not Found in English ( n y r n nh)
A second difficulty for English speakers is that Australian languages generally have
nasal consonants at the same places of articulation as plosives. Thus, a language
may have not only m n ng but also a palatal ny, a retroflex rn and a lamino-dental
nh. Despite its common spelling as ny, the palatal nasal is not a sequence of n
plus g, although this is a reasonable approximation if you are speaking an Aboriginal
language with an English accent. It is in fact the sound written as g n in French
and Italian and as G in Spanish. (Alternative spellings in Australian languages
include Gand nj.) The retroflex r n should be pronounced in the same way as r t ,
with the tongue tip curled up into the roof of the mouth, the lamino-dental n h
in the same way as th, with the blade of the tongue pressed against the back of
the upper teeth. Most English speakers find it very hard to hear the difference
between n h and n.
2.4 Lateral Consonants (I ly rl Ih)
As with nasal consonants, many Australian languages have more lateral sounds
than the one I of English. ly represents a palatal lateral, which is not identical
to a sequence of I plus y of the kind heard in English 'full-year' but is a single
 ...
NOTES ON LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS Xlll

consonant as represented by g1 in Italian or II in standard Spanish. rl is a retroflex

lateral, with the tongue tip curled up into the roof of the mouth, and lh a lamino-
dental lateral, with the blade of the tongue touching the back of the upper teeth.
2.5 Semivowels (W y)
Both W and y are common in Australian languages and are pronounced as in
English. Notice that both sounds can occur between vowels: the word mayi sounds
like 'mah-yee', somewhat like 'my' or 'my-ee', the word kawu like 'kah-woo',
somewhat like 'cow' or 'cow-00'.
2.6 R-sounds (r r r rd)
All Australian languages distinguish two sorts of r-sound, one very similar to the
Australian English r of 'run' or 'around', the other a trilled or flapped rr of the
kind heard in Scottish English or Italian or Spanish. The two sounds are quite
distinct, as different to Aboriginal speakers as I and r or n and ng. The spelling
usually differentiates them as single r versus double m Australian English speakers
should be aware here of their habit of not pronouncing final r-sounds. It is normal
in Australian English (and in New Zealand and much of Britain) to drop r in final
position. Thus, there is no r-sound on the end of 'car' or 'ear', although the sound
is restored when a vowel follows, as in 'car-alarm' or 'ear-ache'. This habit should
not be imported into Aboriginal languages: the Yir-Yoront word larr 'ground', for
instance, should be pronounced with a trilled or flapped r-sound on the end, as
in a Scottish pronunciation of 'car' or 'bar'.
A few Australian languages have yet another r-sound, one in which
the tongue starts from a retroflex position, with the tongue tip up in the roof of
the mouth, and then flaps forward striking the gum ridge as it passes. This sound
occurs in Warlpiri (in addition to r and W ) and is written rd.
2.7 Fricatives
As mentioned earlier, most Australian languages have no fricative consonants such
as English f and S. A few do, and in chapter 7 you will find the word ef 'tongue'
quoted from a Cape York language. You will also find that in a few languages, plosive
sounds are sometimes pronounced as fricatives. This is the case in Bundjalung
(chapter 5 ) , where, very much as in Spanish, plosives between vowels are
pronounced as fricatives - for example, b as a bilabial fricative [ p ] (like [v] but
made with both lips, not with teeth and lip), and g as a velar fricative [ y ] (like
the ch of Scottish 'loch' but with voicing).
xiv LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINU AUSTRALIA

COWENTIONS FOR T m GRAMMATICALITY/ACCEPTABILIW OF

SENTENCES
Linguists need to signal the different reactions that speakers have about expressions
in a language. Some expressions are simply ungrammatical because they conflict
with the rules of grammar which may be implicit but reflect our understanding
of how the language works:
*Me like bananas.
*Harry like bananas.
In one sentence the form of the pronoun 'me' is inappropriate in that position
in the sentence while in the other it is a rule of English grammar that the verb
form must be 'likes' in such a sentence.
But there are other expressions where speakers might not reject the
sentence out of hand although they feel dubious about its acceptability:
Max gave the fence a new coat of paint.
?Max gave a new coat of paint to the fence.
Nigel was kicked by his father.
?Nigel was wanted by his father.
??Nigel was resembled by his father.
And there may be sentences where speakers feel uncertain as to
whether the expression breaks the structural rules and is ungrammatical or merely
seems strange and is therefore unacceptable:
?*Harry and me like bananas.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA xv

Adelatde language Koko-Bera Pintupt 50

Alawa Kukatja Pitjantjatjara 51
Alyawarra Kungarakany Rernbarrnga 52
Arrernte Kurtjar Tasmanian 53
Awaba Lard11 Thawa 54
Bandlalang Lurttja Thayorre 55
Bundjalung Madngele Tiwl 56
Burarra Malak-Malak Uw-Oykangand 57
Demin Manand~ali Waanyi 58
Dharuk Mangarayi Wahlubal 6
Dhuwaya Manyjll~arra Waka Waka 59
Diarl Mara Walrnajarr~ 60
Diyarl Maranunggu Warai 61
D[arnbarrpuyngu Maung Warlpiri 62
Dyirbal Minyangbal Warndarang 63
Gab! Gab1 M~rlarn 'Warurnungu 64
Ganggai~da Murr~nh-Patha W ~ ~ l i T 68 g ~ '
Garawa Ndjebbana Wehlubal 6
G~dhabal Ngaanyatjarra Wik-Mungkan 65
Gugada Ngalakan Wlk-Ngathana 65
Gupapuyngu Ngandi Wiradhur~ 66
Guugu Y~rn~dhirr Ngan'gikurunggurr Wlradjur~ 66
lora Ngan'gltyemerrl Wiyabal 6
Jawoyn Ngan'g~wumtrri Woiwurrung 67
J~ngalu Ngarinyin Wuyabal 6
Kaladilt Ngiyambaa Yankunytlatjara 68
Kala Lagaw Ya Nunggubuyu Yeeman 69
Kamllaroi Nyangbal Yir-Yoront 70
Kaurna Nyangurnarta Yolngu-Matha 71
Kayardild Parnkalia Yugarnbeh 6

Map l: Approximate locations of languages referred to in this volume (based

on Dixon 1980, xviii-X&).
xvi W G U A G E m D CULTURE IN ABORIGINM A U S T U I A

l
Eem me
R i i

M W "= M,.e"bW
-
BevMey SptWs Gule-
Daly Rkss 3 Nm* Wmbw
= smm T ~ W S
Npkurr= R o w Rtwm

Map 2: Location of placenames referred to in this volume.

LANGUAGE M D CULTURE IN ABORIGINM A U S T m L 4 xvii

PREFACE

T he initial impetus for this volume arose from a belief that there were many
important issues concerned with language in Aboriginal Australia which were
not known to a wide enough audience. Over the last twenty years a tremendous
amount of work has been carried out on the languages of Aboriginal Australia.
But much of this is not readily accessible to non-specialists even though a number
of general, overview accounts have appeared. Among these are Barry J. Blake's
basic introduction (Australian Aboriginal Languages, Angus and Robertson,
Sydney 1981, with a second edition from University of Queensland Press, St Lucia,
in 1991), R.M.W. Dixon's Th,e Languages of Australia (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1980) and Colin Yallop's Australian Aboriginal Languages (Andre
Deutsch, London 1982). These are representative of the potential range of such
coverages. Blake (1981, 1991) is very accessible but is quite brief and therefore
cannot address issues in any detail. Dixon (1980) is not only an important reference
but presents original research on the classSication of Australian languages. While
parts of the book are accessible to the public, a substantial portion is challenging
even to the specialist and so this volume, for all its strengths, cannot reach a very
wide audience. Yallop (1982) falls somewhere between Blake and Dixon and
succeeds in giving a brief but less than elementary account of language in
Aboriginal Australia. For those of us involved in teaching basic, overview courses
on Australian languages to students in linguistics or in Aboriginal Studies, none
of these works was entirely satisfactory.
One problem was the potential audience at which general works have
been pitched. Some are clearly too basic for use in an academic context, others
require a background in linguistics even if rather basic. What was needed was an
account that had sufficient depth to excite the continuing interest of students
but was not so technical as to exclude a large number of them.
Another problem is the coverage of issues. There are a number of
recurring questions put to so-called specialists on Australian Aboriginal languages
(sometimes to the point of posing an occupational hazard!): how many Aboriginal
languages are there? are they written down? where did they come from? why did
they die out? where are they now spoken? what are they like? how many words
do they have? how do they manage in the modern world (in terms of language)?
Each of these questions inevitably leads to numerous others, so that giving a
satisfactory answer can be a daunting task. Because an apparently simple question
often stems from a number of mistaken assumptions, one has to alter the
assumptions before one can begin to answer the question effectively. Often the
xviii LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN MORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

literature is not much help, not so much because the answers are lacking as that
the chain of connection from the original question to underlying assumptions to
an eventual answer is scattered in such a way that one must recommend snippets
of reading from a number of disparate sources.
A major purpose of this volume is to satisfy these two concerns:
accessibility and coverage. As editors we approached potential contributors with
a fairly specific request based on our knowledge of their interests and expertise.
We wanted to provide answers to some of these recurring questions and at the
same time refer to the varying language situations across Aboriginal Australia.
Inevitably there was a certain amount of negotiation involved so that some
contributors ended up offering us something that we might not have otherwise
included. It was also predictable that some contributors fell by the wayside so that
some issues that are worthy of mention have not appeared. But in each case we
emphasised that the topic agreed upon should be accessible to people without
a specialist knowledge of linguistics or of Aboriginal Studies.
The editors had other requirements as well. Each contributor was asked
to make their chapter free-standing. Although there are occasional references from
one chapter to another, any of the chapters in this volume should provide a brief,
accessible, self-contained introduction to the topic under consideration.
Contributors were also invited to provide a section of points for discussion.
Envisaging that this volume might well be used in a teaching context, this section
provides questions and raises issues which are closely linked to the content of
the chapter. Obviously these should only be treated as a guide. We hope that many
other points for discussion will be triggered by reading these chapters. Some readers
may choose to skip over this section altogether.
The result is a somewhat heterogeneous collection in which each
chapter tries to address some of the recurring issues of interest in the broad area
of language and culture in Aboriginal Australia. With the growth of interest in
Aboriginal Studies, we see an important pedagogic function in this volume. But
people who are already specialists in Aboriginal Studies should find plenty to
interest them. Much of the material has not appeared before and certainly some
of it challenges previously held views on the role of language and culture in
Aboriginal Australia.
Michael Wakh and CoZin Yallop
August 1992
 CHAPTER

LANGUAGES AND
THEIR STATUS IN
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

Michael Walsh

NUMBER OF LANGUAGES

I t is thought that around 250 distinct languages were spoken at first

(significant) European contact in the late eighteenth century. Most of
these languages would have had several dialects, so that the total number of named
varieties would have run to many hundreds. This contradicts the still popular view
that there is just one Aboriginal language, perhaps with a number of dialects.
It is difficult to be precise about the numbers of dialects and languages
because the information available is often poor and terms like 'dialect' and
'language' can shade into each other. For the English language we can recognise
dialects like Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, and so
on. The differences between these dialects may not be so great as to interfere
with communication. But what of Scots English and Jamaican English? Here the
differences may be sufficient to create difficulties in communication - at least
in the short term - even though we refer to them as kinds of English. On the
other hand, we also recognise forms of speech which are clearly separate languages,
such as German and Spanish, Irish and Armenian or Hindi and Greek. Despite
their current differences these languages all go back to a single ancestral language
spoken thousands of years ago. In Aboriginal Australia there are languages which
are clearly distinct, like Tiwi (from Bathurst and Melville Islands, off the north
coast of Australia) and Pitjantjatjara (from the desert areas of South Australia and
Western Australia). There are also forms of speech which share much the same
grammar but differ in pronunciation and vocabulary just as various dialects of
English do. Examples of such forms of speech are Gugada, Ngaanyatjarra, Luritja,
Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara, which linguists have classified as belonging to the
Western Desert Language'. This was not a term used by the native speakers
themselves any more than a cover term like the 'Scandinavian Language' is used
by speakers of closely related forms of speech like Danish and Norwegian. Danes
and Norwegians feel that they have a separate language with a separate territory
and that their language is a reflection of their group identity. The dialects of the
Western Desert Language were spoken over a vast area of well over a million square
kilometres in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. Not
surprisingly there would be difficulties in communication between speakers of
dialects which were widely separated. Rumsey takes up questions of language,
territory and group identity in Aboriginal Australia (in chapter 14).
2 MICHAEL WALSH

T H E DECLINE OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

Soon after the arrival of the Europeans, Australian languages began to decline.
A recent study of the language situation in Australia indicates that 160 languages
are extinct, seventy are under threat and only twenty are likely to survive (at
least in the short term).
The question must be asked: why did they die out? The contributions
by Crowley (in chapter 4) on Tasmanian and Troy (in chapter 3) on the Sydney
area go some way toward answering this question. From the earliest days of
European contact there was often an assumption that Aboriginal languages were
of less value than English and this view soon hardened into government policy,
which was reinforced through education and employment practices. Aboriginal
people were positively discouraged from speaking their ancestral languages and
made to feel ashamed of using them in public. Eventually the link between
generations of speakers was broken, so that young children had little or no
knowledge of ancestral languages, their parents were partial speakers of these
languages and their grandparents were the only remaining speakers of languages
that may have been passed on from generation to generation over hundreds of
years.
Once this intergenerational link is broken an unwritten language may
disappear very quickly. Evans (forthcoming), for example, reports that varieties
of English have taken over within forty years of significant white contact on
Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. One of the traditional languages,
Kaiadilt, now has no fluent speakers under forty-five years of age. Younger speakers
retain active command of a small vocabulary, but speak Kaiadilt with varying
degrees of fluency.

T H E NATURE OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

People often ask: what are Aboriginal languages like? In a sense this is like asking
what European languages are like. In Europe there are languages as diverse as
Spanish, German and Russian. So too in Australia there are languages which are
very different in nature even though they can be traced back to a common source.
Warlpiri, a language spoken to the northwest of Alice Springs, can be likened to
Latin in that it has an elaborate array of case suffixes (endingsindicating different
functions of nouns). Murrinh-Patha, spoken on the coast south of Darwin, can
be likened to Turkish in that a single word contains many clearly separable chunks
of meaning. For example, the single Murrinh-Patha word manhipurlnu translates
into English as 'I'm going to wash you0 will wash you' (as might be said by a parent
to a child). English spreads the intended meaning across four (or more) separate
LANGUAGES AND THEIR STATUS IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALLA 3

words; Murrinh-Patha links the separate pieces of meaning in one word, somewhat
like beads on a string:
ma-nhi-purl-nu
I-you-wash-will
'I will wash you'
In English we can change meaning by substituting one word for another and adding
others, but in Murrinh-Patha the change may be handled within a single word:
ma-nhi-ma-purl-nu-ngani
I-you-hand-wash-will-I do habitually
'I will keep on washing your hand'
ma-nanku-ma-purl-nu-ngani
I-you two siblings-hand-wash-will-I do habitually
'I will keep on washing the hands of you two sisters'
ma-nanku-ma-purl-nu-nantha-ngani
I-you two-hand-wash-will-two not being sisters, at least one being
female-I do habitually
'I will keep on washing the hands of you two who are not sisters and
one or both are female'

Murrinh-Patha grammar is not simple. In fact, no language has a particularly simple

grammar, although some aspects of some languages seem less complex than others.
The grammar of any language is always shifting. In some respects, for example,
the current grammar of English is simpler than it was BOO years ago, but this does
not mean that there are no longer any complexities in modern English. Secondly,
the grammar is significantly different from that of English - it is neither better
nor worse, just different. Thirdly, differences in grammar between languages create
difficulties in translation. In the examples above it can be seen that Murrinh-Patha
has three ways of expressing 'you-ness': nhi 'you singular'; mnku 'you two
brotherslsisters (siblings)'; mnku wginthu 'you two who are not brot.hers or sisters
and one or both are female'. (And there are four other ways of expressing 'you-
ness' in this language). By contrast English normally has just one form 'you'
whether one is referring to one person or more and regardless of how they might
be related to each other or what sex they are. The translation thus becomes
awkward. On the other hand, Murrinh-Patha does not usually indicate for nouns
whether there is exactly one or more than one, as the grammar of English usually
requires. So a stricter translation of the Murrinh-Patha expressions would indicate
'handhands'. It is always possible in Murrinh-Patha to specify that just one hand
is meant rather than a number of hands but the grammar does not require this
4 MICHAEL W U S H

specification as English grammar does. In the same way, English can resort to
wording such as 'you two' or 'the two of you' but the grammar does not require
these details.
Further details of language structure are outlined by Yallop (in chapter
21, and some of the richness of vocabulary in Australian languages is covered in
the contribution by Simpson (in chapter 9).

THE HISWRY OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

We know that people have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years (and much
longer periods have been suggested). Many Aboriginal people believe that their
ancestors have always been here. Archaeologists, however, think that there has
been more than one influx of people. Until around 7,000 or 8,000 years ago Papua
New Guinea was joined by a land bridge to Australia. We can safely assume that
there would have been contact between the people of Australia and land to the
north.
The Brres Straits Islands still form an island link between Queensland
and Papua New Guinea, the northernmost islands being in sight bf the New Guinea
coastline. This raises the question of whether the languages of Australia are related
to those of New Guinea. In terms of physical type and culture the people of the
Torres Straits Islands are Papuan, but linguistically the islands divide up into two
quite distinct types. Miriam, a Papuan language, is spoken in the east and Kala
Lagaw Ya, clearly an Australian language, is spoken in the west. Kala Lagaw Ya
shows some unusual features for an Australian language but it is clearly of the
Australian type in terms of its grammar.
Archaeologists have claimed that the most recent influx of people was
about 4,000 years ago, probably occurring at the same time as the dingo came
into Australia. This raises the question of how the Australian languages developed.
Have the languages come from one relatively recent source, have they developed
out of earlier migrations, or are there layers reflecting successive migrations of
people speaking quite different languages? Questions of this kind are intriguing
but for the most part unanswerable. For languages in Europe we sometimes have
written records going back thousands of years. For Australian languages the record
is much sparser: for many languages our earliest records are measured in decades
while the first known recording of an Australian language is 1770. Even if the
ancestry of present day Aboriginal languages goes back only 4,000 years, it is
unlikely that careful study could establish links with languages outside.
Most of the possible connections between Australian languages and
other languages of the world have been considered and rejected. Even the
connection with Papua New Guinea, which seems likely given its proximity to the
LANGUAGES AND THEIR S T U U S IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 5

Australian mainland, is yet to be established: it is not so much ruled out, as

unproven. A comparison between Papuan and Australian languages suggests that
there might have been some connection but there is not sufficient evidence to
be sure (Foley 1986, 296-375).
For reasons of this kind the position of Bsmanian is unknown and will
probably remain unknown. The Bsmanian people were subjected to horrific
treatment from government authorities and their languages suffered an early
decline (although the 'hsmanian people have survived as Crowley describes in
chapter 5 ) . We might expect that 'hsmanian languages would have something in
common with languages across the Bass Strait. Until about 10,000 years ago Bass
Strait was dry land but then the sea level rose, cutting off 'Exismania from the
mainland (see Map 3).

Map 3: The coastline of southeastern Australia during the height of the iceage.
18,000 years ago Bass Strait was dry land and the mainland took in Tasmania
and the area shown in white (from Blake 1991, 32).
6 MICHAEL W U S H

Even if the records for languages of %mania and southern Victoria were extensive,
the connection would be very hard to establish after a separation of 10,000years.
The written records are quite meagre, especially for Bsmanian.
There is evidence of contact between Indonesia and northern Australia
in relatively recent times. %wards the end of the seventeenth century traders
from around what is today known as southern Sulawesi began to visit the shores
of northern Australia to collect and process a much-prized commodity variously
known as trepang, bkhe-de-mer or sea-cucumber. These Macassan traders set up
seasonal camps on the northern Australian coast for months at a time] mingling
with the local Aboriginal population. Some Aborighes seem to have travelled back
to Indonesia with the boat crews, returning to Australia on later trading expeditions.
This contact is demonstrated linguistically by a sizeable stock of words in some
Aboriginal languages of northeast Arnhem land, such as rrupiya 'money' -
distantly derived from 'rupee' (Walker and Zorc 1981). In addition] it may be that
a Macassan-based pidgin developed for use not only between Aborigines and the
boat crews but also for casual contact among Aborigines along the coast who did
not have a language in common (Urry and Walsh 1981).
Although our understanding of outside connections is limited, most
linguists now believe that the 250 Australian languages are genetically related and
can be traced back to a common source called proto-Australian. For further
comments] see the opening section of Yallop's chapter 2.

THE EFFECTS OF CONTACT ON AUSTRBIAN LANGUAGES

European contact has had a profound impact on Australian languages. We have
already seen (in the second section of this chapter) that the languages have
declined. In this section we consider the rise of pidgins, creoles and lingua francas,
as well as the influence of English.
From earliest European contact pidgins developed when the settlers
and the local people tried to communicate with each other. A pidgin is born out
of the needs of this contact where neither people has learnt the language of the
other fully and might not need to. If its purposes are limited, the pidgin itself will
remain limited. It will be a simplified form of speech employing some of the features
of both languages with a predominance from the dominant language, in this case
English. If there are greater needs for the pidgin, it will become more complex.
With extended contact, a creole may arise which is still English-based but has a
much wider application, being used to meet all the communicative requirements
of its speakers.
W G U A G E S U D THEIR STATUS IN ABORIGINM AUSTRALIA 7

Troy (chapter 3) describes early contact in the Sydney area while Harris
and Rhydwen (chapters l0 and 11)outline the rise of the widespread English-based
creole called Kriol in northern Australia. Kriol varies over the vast area in which
it is used by having an input from the local Aboriginal language in a particular
area. Nevertheless, Kriol is largely intelligible over this whole area. Some of the
English-based pidgins contributed to the development and spread of creoles and
some have now died out, but there were also pidgins which arose from contact
between Aboriginal people and non-Europeans. The following map (Map 4) gives
an idea of the spread of contact varieties:

m
{-

? WESTERN AUSTRALIA

TASMANIA

Map 4: Pidgins and creoles in Australia (adapted with permission from Wurm
and Hattori 1981, Map 24).
8 MICHAEL WALSH

Another effect of European contact is the emergence of indigenous

lingua francas. These are traditional Aboriginal languages which have emerged
as a common means of communication for a community or region. For example,
at Wadeye (on the west coast of the Northern Territory) from 1935 missionaries
brought together speakers of a number of mutually unintelligible languages. Over
the past fifty years one of these, Murrinh-Patha, emerged as the lingua franca
for the area and is now used as the medium for the local bilingual education
program.
English has had a linguistic effect through its contribution to pidgins
and creoles, but it has also had important consequences in its own right. English
has been adopted by many Aboriginal Australians but may differ in subtle ways
from English as used by other Australians (see Eades in chapter 13).And, of course,
English words have been taken into Aboriginal languages to meet new needs (see
the contributions by Black and Simpson in chapters 15 and 9).
One important feature of the English used by Aboriginal Australians
is the use of terms to describe groups of people, especially Aborigines and non-
Aborigines. Elsewhere in this volume you will find terms such as Koori and Murri,
which are used by some Aborigines to refer to themselves. This reflects a
dissatisfaction with the identifier labels which have been imposed upon them from
outside their culture:
The word 'Aborigine' comes from the Latin word a b origine
meaning 'from the beginning'. It should be a proud word,
because our peoples have occupied this land since the
Dreamtime began, not merely for 150 years. But for many
people it has become debased, part of the negative
perception of us and our heritage. (Mattingley and Hampton
1988, xv)
Most of the terms are based on Aboriginal words for 'person' or 'man'. The fact
that there are several is a reminder that Aboriginal languages differ across the
continent. The most common words are:
Koori New South Wales and Victoria
Murri Queensland
Nyoongah southwestern Western Australia
Yammagee Western Australia, around the Murchison River

A LINGUISTIC CONTRlBU770NTO AUSTRALIANENGLISH

Australian languages have also contributed to English. Perhaps the best known
loan word from an Australian language into English is 'kangaroo', used to refer
LANGUAGES AND THEIR STATUS IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

to a creature that was quite unfamiliar to Europeans. The word is derived from
Guugu Yimidhirr, a language spoken around Cooktown in northern Queensland.
Many well-known loan words come from the Aboriginal people of the Sydney area:
billabong, dingo, koala, kookaburra, nulla nulla (a kind of wooden club) and
woomera (spear-thrower). Others, understandably, come from a region where the
things the words refer to occur: so words like 'jarra' and 'quokka' come from
languages of Western Australia. For many non-Aboriginal Australians their most
frequent encounter with Australian languages is with placenames like Canberra,
Coolangatta, Kununurra, Mallacoota, Parramatta and Uluru. In some instances
the sources for these place names are not clear: Canberra, for example, is said
to have meanings as different as 'breasts' and 'meeting place'. Sometimes
connections between words sharing a common source are not obvious. The first
part of the place name Gulargambone is the same as the word for the distinctively
Australian bird, the galah. These related terms, Gulargambone and galah, are found
in Ngiyambaa, a language traditionally spoken in western New South Wales.
In recent years there have been moves to reinstate Aboriginal
placenames. In the Northern Territory, Ayer's Rock is also referred to as Uluru,
Roper River has become Ngukurr, Delissaville has become Belyuen and Port Keats
is now Wadeye. This process is not without problems. Ngukurr is difficult for many
non-Aboriginal Australians, starting with a sound which can only occur at the end
of a syllable in English and finishing with a trilled 'r' sound. Wadeye is problematic
because there is a tendency to interpret the word from the perspective of English
spelling: wad-eye. In fact, it is a three syllable word with the last two vowels
pronounced like the 'e' in 'egg'. This can result in two pronunciations: one as the
local Aboriginal people say it; the other transformed by the spelling of the word
and by the lack of fit between the sound system of English and the local Aboriginal
language.

RECORDING AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

The recording of Australian languages began with white contact but the results
have been very uneven. In 1770 Captain Cook and Joseph Banks took down word
lists from people living in Cape York in the area that has come to be called
Cooktown. It was from this source that 'kangaroo' passed into English. In the early
days of settlement some of the more detailed recordings of Australian languages
were carried out by missionaries who eventually hoped to produce translations
of the Bible. Unfortunately some languages were not recorded in any detail. Thawa,
the language of Twofold Bay in the southeastern corner of New South Wales, is
known only from a few word lists while Yeeman, formerly spoken near Brisbane,
10 MICHAEL WALSH

is known only by its name. Valuable work was carried out by people from varied
backgrounds: policemen, surveyors, farmers and clergymen. One of the most
significant contributions was made by a Victorian sheep farmer, Edward
Micklethwaite Curr. In the latter part of the nineteenth century Curr widely
distributed a questionnaire seeking information on local languages. His four-volume
work, The Australian Race (1886-87), was the most comprehensive compilation
of knowledge on Australian languages in its day. In some instances most of what
we now know about a particular language is to be found in Curr's collection.
It is only quite recently that the systematic study of Australian
languages has become more widespread. Separate departments of linguistics only
came into being in Australian universities in the mid-1960s. The establishment of
the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Australia in the late 1950s was an important
development for a fuller knowledge of Australian languages. This organisation is
devoted to the translation of the Bible into local languages but also has contributed
strongly to indigenous (secular) literacy and to the description of Aboriginal
languages. Perhaps the most exciting initiative in recent times has been the setting
up of the School of Australian Linguistics in 1974. This institution provided training
for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in techniques of linguistic analysis
as well as skills for literacy work and translating and interpreting. Apart from the
assistance such skills could provide in applied linguistic work in Aboriginal
communities, there is tremendous potential for a more detailed understanding of
Australian languages. No matter how talented, a linguistic researcher cannot
compete with native-speaker knowledge.
The scope of investigation for any given Australian language varies
considerably. For the bulk of Australia's ancestral languages one must rely on early
written records, there being no surviving fluent speakers. This can amount to
detective work of a linguistic kind. The records will always be incomplete, often
difficult to interpret because of the recording techniques of non-specialists in
linguistics, and frequently conflicting. Some of the difficulties involved in coming
to understand these early records are brought out in the chapters by Crowley on
Tasmanian (chapter 4) and by Sharpe on Bundjalung (chapter 5).
For languages still in everyday use the challenges for adequate
documentation are rather daunting. In chapter 2 Yallop briefly indicates some of
the details of language structure that can be investigated. In chapter 9 Simpson
explores some of the possibilities for modern dictionaries, while in chapter 15 Black
looks at some of the needs encountered by Australian languages as they
accommodate to the introduced culture of the Europeans. Increasingly there are
collections of text material appearing in Australian languages. These range from
transcriptions of traditional stories and life histories to announcements about
LANGUAGES AND THEIR STATUS IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALLA 11

forthcoming events such as elections, and instructions on how to repair a gearbox.

In the development of this new literature there is increasing Aboriginal
involvement, some of it focused in regionally based language resource centres.
Such centres provide a venue for language policy including the control by
Aborigines of linguistic research in their area.

RESPONDING TO NEW CHALLENGES

In chapter 15 Black concentrates on some of the new uses for Australian languages.
Writing and literacy are not yet universal in the English-speaking community in
Australia and were much less widespread even a few generations ago. For many
Aboriginal Australians these skills have only appeared in the last fifty years or
less. But there is the dual challenge of taking on these new skills in their own
languages as well as English. Some of the problems involved are discussed by
Rhydwen (in chapter 11). Aboriginal people have also had to accommodate to new
forms of communication of technology: cameras, radio, television and telephones.
They have also had to respond to new communication situations, including Western-
style education, the law, land rights and negotiations. These latter areas are
considered by Christie, Eades and Rumsey (in chapters 12,13,14) while a more
general account is given by Walsh (1991).

LANGUAGE AND ABORIGINALITY

What effect has the decline of Australian languages had on Aborigines today? One
European commentator has claimed (Dixon 1980, 79):
If a minority group is to maintain its ethnic identity and
social cohesion it must retain its language (the Basques and
the Jews provide two quite diverse examples). Once a group
has lost its language, it will generally lose its separate
identity and will, within a few generations, be
indistinguishably assimilated into another, more dominant
political group.
At first glance this statement may seem reasonable but it requires some
interpretation. It is true that Hebrew has played an important role in Jewish ethnic
identity, but there are many Jews who do not speak Hebrew with any fluency
and this does not detract from their Jewishness. Of course they may regret their
lack of knowledge of the language and strongly favour its maintenance but the
loss of language does not automatically signal a loss of identity.
Language in Aboriginal Australia continues to play an important role
in Aboriginal identity despite the decline of many ancestral languages. Asked how
important language was in preserving culture one Aborigine has said:
12 MICHAEL WALSH

Oh, it's our lifeblood. This is what we tell the young people.
You have to know your language because you'll never be
able to learn your Dreaming and if you don't know your
Dreaming you can't identify where you belong. If you don't
identify where you belong you may as well say you're dead.
As an Aboriginal person you have to know your language
to be able to learn your Dreamings. (Bowden and Bunbury
1990, 32-33).
Black (chapter 15) points out that Aboriginal culture is not static and
varies across the continent. Aboriginal people who have grown up and lived their
whole lives in the towns and cities of 'settled' Australia can still retain an Aboriginal
identity. Eades (in chapter 13) shows that such people may have a quite distinctive
form of English which a t once sets them apart from other Australians and at the
same time marks them as members of one group. Crowley (in chapter 4) points
out that Aboriginality can survive the loss of traditional languages. Rumsey (in
chapter 14) demonstrates that language can play a crucial role in group and
territorial identity whether one knows that language or not. In chapter 5, Sharpe
describes the efforts made by Aboriginal people to maintain their linguistic
heritage. In these and other chapters it should become clear that Aboriginality
is not reliant merely on knowledge of an ancestral language but may involve the
use of a creole or of a distinctive form of English.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why are there now so few Aboriginal languages? Is this recent decline in
linguistic diversity unusual in other areas in the region around Australia? Or the
world?
2. Many ethnic groups are recognised in multicultural Australia. To what extent
is knowledge of language associated with ethnicity? Consider various groups such
as Dutch, Greek, Italian, Scots and Vietnamese. How do some of these groups differ
from each other?
3. Which of the following words have been borrowed from Aboriginal languages?
- boomerang, cockatoo, dinkum, humpy, jacaranda, wattle, woomera. (If you don't
know, consult a good dictionary such as the Macquarie.) Try to identify more
borrowings from Australian Aboriginal languages into English.
4. Imagine that you are one of a few hundred speakers of English living on a
small island. English is spoken nowhere else in the world. Suppose now that
speakers of a totally different language come and visit and settle your island. How
might you try to communicate? How could you go about learning the newcomers'
language? How might you try to teach or explain English to the newcomers?
LANGUAGES AND THEIR STATUS IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 13

REFERENCES
Blake, B.
1991 Woiwummg, the Melbourne Language. In R.M.W. Dixon and B.J.
Blake (eds), The Handbook of Australian Languages, v01 4 , Oxford
University Press, Melbourne.
Bowden, R. and B. Bunbury
1990 Being Aboriginal. Comments, Observations and Stories from
Aboriginal Australians, ABC Books, Sydney.
Curr, E.M.
1886-87 The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Land-
ing in Australia, and the Routes by Which It Spread Itself over That
Continent, 4 vols, J . Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne.
Dixon, R.M.W.
1980 The Languages of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
1983 Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker,
University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.
Evans, N.
forth-
coming Age, Sex and Language Shift among the Kayardild. In P. McConvell
and R. Amery (eds), Can Aboriginal and Islander Languages Sur-
vive?, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld.
Foley, W.
1986 The Papuan Languages of New Guinea, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Mattingley, C. and K. Hampton
1988 Survival in Our Own Land. 'Aboriginal' Experiences in 'SouthAus-
tralia' since 1836, ALDAA in association with Hodder and Stough-
ton, Adelaide.
Urry, J. and M. Walsh
1981 The Lost 'Macassan' Language of Northern Australia, Aboriginal His-
tory 5 , 91-108.
Walker, A. and D. Zorc
1981 Austronesian Loanwords in Yolngu-Matha of Northeast Arnhem
Land, Aboriginal History 5 , 109-134.
Walsh, M.
1991 Conversational Styles and Intercultural Communication: An Exam-
ple from Northern Australia, Australian Journal of Com~nu?zica-
tion 18(1), 1-12.
Wurm, S.A. and S. Hattori
1981 Language A t l a of the Pacific Area: Part 1, Australian Academy of
the Humanities and the Japan Academy, Canberra.
 CHAPTER

121 THE STRUCTURE OF

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL
LANGUAGES

Colin Yallop

CLASSIFICATION

M any of the world's languages show similarities to each other. Similarities

may be just coincidences, and linguists are not persuaded that languages
have a historical connection until they find reasonably systematic evidence. For
example, the fact that the English word 'three' sounds and looks somewhat like
the Dutch drie and German drei is of itself no proof that English, Dutch and
German are historically related. It is only when we find a pattern of
correspondences that we can take languages to be related. One of the relevant
patterns here is that many English words beginning with th have counterparts
in Dutch and German with d:
English Dutch German
thank danken danken
thin dun dUnn
think denken denken
three drie drei
through door durch
thunder donder Donner
To establish that English, Dutch and German are part of a wider Indo-
European family of languages, we need to pursue such regular patterns further,
noting for example that Latin has a corresponding tin words such as tennis (thin),
tres (three), and so on. A painstaking search for correspondences such as these
lies behind the assumption that the Indo-European languages of Europe and South
Asia constitute a related family.
Closer to Australia, research of a similar kind has established that a
large number of Pacific and Southeast Asian languages form a family usually known
as Austronesian. This family includes languages as far apart as Hawaiian, Fijian,
Maori, Indonesian, Javanese and Malagasy. Note, for example, the correspondences
in :
English Indonesian Javanese Fijian
& Malay
moon bulan wulan vula
fruit buah woh vua
iron besi wesi vesi
16 COLIN YALLOP

Linguists have not found evidence to demonstrate a historical

relationship between Australian Aboriginal languages and languages outside
Australia. Aboriginal languages show no special similarity to Austronesian
languages, for instance. On the other hand, Aboriginal languages probably are all
related to each other. Of course the languages do differ from each other quite
substantially,just as English, Dutch and German do, or Indonesian, Javanese and
Fijian, despite their historical connections.
Often the words of Australian languages - the vocabulary or lexicon,
as linguists would say - are strikingly varied. There are a few examples of words
that can be found in similar form over a large number of languages. The word
for 'hand', for instance, is often mara, rnala or maa, and the word for 'you and
I' is ngali in many languages. But often vocabulary is surprisingly diverse. Even
neighbouring languages that seem closely related in pronunciation and grammar
may reveal differences in quite common words. For example, in Arrernte, spoken
around Alice Springs, the word for 'dog' is kngulya. In the Western Desert
languages to the west of Arrernte, the word is tjitutja or papa; in Warlpiri to the
northwest of Arrernte, the word is maliki; and even in closely related languages
to the east and northeast of Arrernte, the word is aringka or alika. Despite this
lexical diversity, there is enough evidence, from pronunciation and grammar as
well as from a small number of related words, to persuade most linguists to treat
Australian Aboriginal languages as one large family.
There have been attempts to classify Australian - to establish
groupings within the family, just as Indo-European languages are grouped into
Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Slavonic, and so on. But these attempts
have not provided a useful and lasting classification, other than to divide languages
spoken in the far north from the rest of the country. To be more precise, Australian
languages other than those from the north of Western Australia and the north
and northwest of the Northern Territory show considerable similarities in
pronunciation and grammar. They are known as Pama-Nyungan,a term based on
words for 'man' in the far north of Queensland (vama) and the southwest of
Western Australia (nyunga)(see Map 5). The northern languages, usually referred
to simply as non-Pama-Nyungan,not only differ from Pama-Nyunganbut are also
more diverse among themselves.

GRAMMAR
We have already referred to grammar several times and need to explain the term.
In recent years, grammar has not figured prominently in many schools. Those who
have had little or no instruction in grammar may assume that it is something
technical and obscure, and even those who have been taught something called
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 17

Map 5: Distribution of Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages

(from Blake 1988, 87).

'grammar' may have gained the impression that it is a matter of learning a set
of terms (such as 'noun' and 'transitive verb') and mastering difficult rules
governing whether to say 'it is I' or 'it is me', or 'for you and I' or 'for you and me'.
It is true that 'grammar' can mean something like a grammar book or
a set of grammatical rules, particularly rules that people will keep breaking unless
they are firmly taught them. But there is another sense of the word that means
something like 'the way in which a language is organised'. In this second sense
all of us have a command of grammar, even if we speak only one language and
have never consciously learned any grammatical rules or terms.
This point is not always readily accepted in English-speaking countries,
partly because of an educational tradition of concentrating on only some parts
of the language. In speaking English, we all follow many 'rules of grammar' which
rarely if ever attract much attention. For example, we all obey certain 'rules' of
word order. Anyone who speaks English says:
Did you hear that huge explosion last night?
18 COLIN YALLOP

No one who grew up speaking English needs formal instruction in putting these
words in the right order, nor is tempted to break the pattern by saying, for instance,
'did hear you' instead of 'did you hear' or 'that explosion huge' instead of 'that
huge explosion'. There are many other such patterns underlying our normal usage.
Even this one example is sufficient to illustrate a pattern for asking a question
('did you hear' compared with 'you did hear' or 'you heard') and a pattern for
certain kinds of processes and things (in English you can ask people whether they
heard something, as you can ask whether they saw something, but you would be
asking different questions if you asked whether they heard or read 'about'
something).
These rules or patterns can be described as part of English grammar.
They are part of how we express ourselves in English. Other languages may or
may not have similar patterns. In some languages, such as Dutch and German,
a word like 'huge' would precede 'explosion', as in English; in others, such as
Spanish and Indonesian, the order would be the reverse. Few languages happen
to have anything like the English question pattern represented by 'did you hear?';
in many languages the pattern would simply be a reversal of the corresponding
statement: 'heard you?'. In fact this was once the pattern in English but it has
been replaced. Only in old texts, such as the 1611 translation of the Bible, do we
find patterns like:

Know ye what I nave done to you?

Sayest thou this thing of thyself?
Why baptizest thou then?
where more modern equivalents would be:
Do you know what I have done to you?
Do you say this thing of yourself?
Why do you baptise then?

Grammar as taught in schools in the past often had little or nothing

to say about patterns such as these. And in a way this was understandable since
most of us learned the patterns quite unconsciously before going to school. What
was taught as grammar was often directed towards understanding and learning
the patterns of other languages, such as Latin and French. That was also
understandable, given the importance of these languages in the educational system
of the time. It was unfortunate, however, that English grammar tended to be judged
in the light of Latin grammar: in some instances grammarians and teachers actually
tried to make English conform to Latin patterns, in others they imposed rules for
which there seems to have been very little justification at all, and in general they
fostered the idea that you needed to learn special rules to be able to speak English
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 19

properly - or more particularly to be able to produce elegant written English.

Many people still have an uneasy feeling that the way they normally use English
cannot be quite right and that they need to remember and apply artificial rules
to their written English.

THE GRAMMAR OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

Australian Aborigines had no tradition of writing grammars or rule books. On the
other hand, their languages certainly had grammar in the sense of organised and
patterned expression. Some of the patterning seems similar enough to English,
but there are surprises for those who might assume that every language should
be like English.
For a first look at the grammar of one language, some simple sentences
are given below in Guugu Yimidhirr, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken by the
people with whom Captain Cook made contact in 1770 in the area we now call
Cooktown in northern Queensland. The examples are based on Haviland's account
of the language (Haviland 1979).
ngayu bull I fell down
nyundu bull you fell down
yugu buli the tree fell down
gudaa bull the dog fell down
ngayu nhina nhaadhi I saw you
nyundu nganhi nhaadhi you saw me
ngayu yugu nhaadhi I saw the tree
Some features of these sentences are similar to English (ngayu precedes
buli, just as 'I' precedes 'fell down', for example) but there are also many
differences. There is nothing corresponding to 'the', and the word order in the
last three sentences differs from English ('I you saw', 'you me saw', 'I tree saw').
Moreover, Guugu Yimidhirr has different forms of 'you' depending on whether
you are doing something ('you saw me') or whether you are on the receiving end
of the action ('I saw you'). Note that English makes such a difference between
'I' and 'me' but not between forms of 'you', whereas Guugu Yimidhirr makes a
difference in both cases. The word for 'tree', however, remains the same in both
Guugu Yimidhirr and English, whether it is doing something ('the tree fell down')
or not ('I saw the tree').
Some more examples of Guugu Yunidhirr begin to reveal how different
the patterning really is:
gudaangun nhina nhaadhi the dog saw you
gudaangun nganhi nhaadhi the dog saw me
nyundu bayan nhaadhi you saw the house
yugungun bayan dumbi the tree smashed the house
20 COLIN YALLOP

Here we find something that is quite unusual compared with the

English patterning. To account for it, we need to introduce some grammatical
concepts. Firstly we need to distinguish things such as dogs and houses and trees
from words referring directly to persons such as 'I', 'me' and 'you'. Using common
grammatical terms we call the first 'nouns' and the second 'personal pronouns'.
Secondly, we need to distinguish actions or processes like falling, from those like
seeing and smashing. One way of describing this difference is to say that the first
type are simple actions in which someone or something does something, while
the second type involves a further participant, someone or something on the
receiving end of the action. Again, there are grammatical terms often used for
these two types of action word: 'intransitive verb' for the first, where there is
no recipient or goal; 'transitive verb' for the second, where the action does, so
to speak, affect or pass on to a second participant. Here are some examples of
intransitive and transitive processes in English:
intransitive transitive
I fell down I saw you
the dog barked the dog bit me
the girl laughed the girl hit the dog
a strong wind was blowing a strong wind blew the tree down
With these terms at our disposal, we can say that in Guugu Yimidhirr,
personal pronouns have the same form when they refer to the performer of an
action, whether transitive or intransitive, but they have a different form as
recipient or goal of a transitive action. On the other hand, nouns take the suffix
-ngun only when they represent the performer of a transitive process, otherwise
nouns have the same unsuffixed form, whether serving as doer of an intransitive
process or goal of a transitive process.
If we look again at Guugu Yimidhirr sentences like:
ngayu bull I fell down
gudaa buli the dog fell down
gudaangun nganhi nhaadhi the dog saw me
ngayu gudaa nhaadhi I saw the dog
we can summarise the patterning of the personal pronoun and the noun in the
following chart.
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 21

pronoun noun
performing a transitive
gudaangun
process
ngaY'J
performing an intransitive
process
gudaa
undergoing a transitive
nganhi
process

Most Pama-Nyungan languages have the same general kind of patterning as Guugu
Yimidhin: Many have a suffix that marks a noun as the agent of a transitive process,
like -?zgunin Guugu Yimidhirr, usually referred to as the 'ergative' suffix. Some
have a suffix that marks pronouns (and sometimes some nouns as well) as the
goal of a transitive process, usually referred to as the 'accusative' suffix. Most
languages have a variety of other suffixes, which mark nouns for other roles besides
agent and goal. In Guugu Yimidhirr, the noun bayan ('house') can take suffixes
like -bi and -nganh:
bayanbi in the house
bayannganh from the house
The different forms of a noun or pronoun, suffixed to signal roles such as agent
or goal or location, are referred to as 'cases'.

BEING AND HAVING IN AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

Here are a few more sentences from Guugu Yimidhirr:
yiyi bayan this is a house
yiyi yugu this is a tree
yugu munhi the tree is black
What may be surprising to English speakers here is that there is nothing
at all in Guugu Yimidhirr corresponding to English 'is' (or 'are' or 'was', et cetera).
In Guugu Yimidhirr - and, in general, in most Australian languages - we do not
say 'X is Y' but simply 'X Y'. Thus, a language like Guugu Yimidhirr makes a fairly
radical difference among three types of process: (1)intransitive processes in which
someone or something acts; (2) transitive processes in which an agent acts on a
goal or recipient; and (3) processes of being in which there is actually no expression
of a process at all, nothing like English 'is' or 'are'. English does not distinguish
these types nearly as sharply. In English, for instance, there is no difference in
form between the actor of an intransitive process and the agent of a transitive
22 COLIN YALLOP

process. Moreover, by the very fact of having 'is' and 'are' English also tends to
make 'being' seem more like other processes of 'doing'.
To illustrate some points about 'having', or possession, we turn to
another Australian language for variety. Alyawarra is spoken in Central Australia,
northeast of Alice Springs, and is closely related to other languages in the area,
the most famous of which is Arrernte. The first few examples below show some
structural similarities with what we have seen in Guugu Yimidhirr, notably the
absence of any word matching 'am' or 'is', different forms of the pronoun 'I' and
'me', and an ergative suffix to mark a noun serving as agent of a transitive process
(in Guugu Yimidhirr the suffix was -ngun, in Alyawarra it is -ila; details of
Alyawarra can be found in Yallop 1977).
ayinga ngayakwa I am hungry
aringka ngayakwa the dog is hungry
aringka apmpima the dog is hot
awiya apmpima the boy is hot
aringkila ayinha utnhika the dog bit me
awiyila aringka atuka the boy hit the dog
The part of the grammar that we are now going to look at concerns
the expression of possession. If we want to say 'my dog', a word corresponding
to 'my' is added after the noun; if we want to say 'the boy's dog', the word for 'boy'
takes a possessive suffix (like the English -'S) and again follows the noun 'dog':
aringka atjinha my dog
aringka awiyikinha the boy's dog
Phrases like these can serve as actors and goals, in the same way as simple nouns.
If the phrase is agent of a transitive process, the whole phrase takes the suffix
-ila, just as a simple noun would:
aringka atjinha ngayakwa my dog is hungry
awiyila aringka atjinha atuka the boy hit my dog
aringka atjinhila awiya utnhika my dog bit the boy
What is strikingly different from English, however, is what happens
with phrases like 'the boy's hand' and 'my hand'. Since 'hand' is iltja, we might
expect the Alyawarra to be iltja awigikinha and iltja atjinha. In fact, we find
the language works as follows:
awiya iltja apmpima the boy's hand is hot
ayinga iltja apmpima my hand is hot
aringkila awiya iltja utnhika the dog bit the boy's hand
aringkila ayinha iltja utnhika the dog bit my hand

Literally, viewed through English, the Alyawarra wording is:

THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

the boy the hand hot

I the hand hot
the dog bit the boy the hand
the dog bit me the hand
Here possession is not marked at all, but the two words are simply placed alongside
each other. In other words, in Alyawarra you would not hold the boy's hand, you
would hold the boy the hand, as if you were holding both the boy and the hand.
If we are willing to think this through from the Alyawarra perspective, it does
not seem unreasonable. After all, my hand is not something that I possess in the
same way that I possess my dog or my car. My hand is part of me. When a dog
bites my hand it does not bite some separate object that happens to belong to me,
it bites me. The Alyawarra wording expresses this as the dog biting both me and
the hand. In general, Alyawarra uses these two different patterns to distinguish
between possession and a part-whole relationship. Anything that is a part of
something will not be treated as a possession but will be expressed by putting the
two words alongside each other, exactly in the manner of awiya iltja.
To look at it in another way, we might ask what it would mean to the
Alyawarra to use English-style constructions. In fact, you could say 'my leg' in
Alyawarra, using the possessive construction, but it would imply either that my
leg is somehow detached from me or that the leg is not part of me (as if you were,
for instance, sharing the meat of a bird and claiming a leg - 'that's my leg').
Many of the world's languages are in fact more like Alyawarra than
English in this respect. We might say that they project a narrow view of possession.
Indeed, it may be fairer to say that English and some other European languages
are unusual in the extent to which they allow the possessive construction to cover
all sorts of relationships that are not really possessive at all. Having looked at how
a language like Alyawarra works, we may wonder why English so readily accepts
phrases like 'my arm', 'my name' and 'my father'. (This question is taken up in
the second point for discussion at the end of this chapter.)

QUESTIONS
Another area of grammar in which there are significant differences between
Australian languages and English is that of questioning. As we mentioned earlier
in this chapter, English has its own ways of distinguishing between statements
and questions, for example:
statement question
you heard me did you hear me?
Jenny likes coffee does Jenny like coffee?
Harry doesn't like tea doesn't Harry like tea?
24 COLIN YALLOP

In fact, English grammar allows for various kinds of question. In addition to what
you might call a direct question, open to a 'yes' or 'no', we also have questions
that seem to expect 'yes' rather than 'no' or 'no' rather than 'yes', as well as the
possibility of merely repeating something with questioning intonation to check
whether we have heard correctly:
does Jenny like coffee? (open to 'yes' or 'no')
Jenny likes coffee, doesn't she? (expecting 'yes')
Jenny doesn't like coffee, does she? (expecting 'no')
Jenny likes coffee? ('is that what you said?')
The grammar of questions in Australian languages is, of course,
different from English. Here are some examples of statements and questions from
Walmajarri, a language spoken around Fitzroy Crossing in the north of Western
Australia. (Basic information about the language also written 'Walmatjari', is in
Hudson and Richards 1978; but point 4 for discussion at the end of this chapter
gives more examples and you may find it useful to tackle that now, to work out
what each element means, including for instance the -lu in palzi and ngalu.)
yanku palu they will go
yanku ngalu will they go?
yani palu they went
yani pa he or she went
yani nga did he or she go?
yani pa manga the girl went
yani palu mangawarnti the girls went
yani ngalu mangawarnti did the girls go?
There is yet another type of question in many languages - t h e
information-seeking question that contains a question word such as 'who?' or
'where?' or 'when?' In Walmajarri, the words corresponding to 'where' and 'when'
are wanyjuria and nyanguria:
wanyjurla palu yani where did they go?
nyangurla palu yanku when will they go?
The word for 'who' is ngana. Like other nouns and pronouns in most Pama-
Nyungan languages, ngana takes an ergative suffix when it is agent of a transitive
process. In Walmajarri the relevant suffix is -ngu:
ngana pa pinya mangangu who did the girl hit?
nganangu pa pinya parri who hit the boy?

It seems that in most Australian languages words like 'who?' and

'what?' actually have an indefinite meaning, so that 'who?' could be reinterpreted
as 'someone or other, I don't know who', and 'what?' could be reinterpreted as
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 25

'something or other, I don't know what'. Thus, a speaker of an Australian language

might appear to be asking:
who took this photo and sent it to my brother?
when a better translation into English might be:
someone took this photo and sent it to my brother.
Now, there are two ways of approaching this grammatical phenomenon.
We could say, more or less as we have just said above, that a n Australian word
for 'who?' actually means both 'who?' (questioning) and 'someone' (indefinite,
unspecified). But we should stop to ask whether this twofold meaning of the word
is really a consequence of approaching the language via English. Suppose we try
to forget the English distinction between 'who?' and 'someone' and ask what it
means to speak a language that has no such distinction. It would mean - and
we cannot entirely forget English grammar when we use English to talk about
another language - that you don't really ask questions that seek specific
information but you reveal gaps in your own knowledge to allow other people to
fill them in. In this connection, we could compare two styles of interacting. The
first would include direct questioning, expecting straight answers, and a
conversation in this style might go something like this:
Who took the photo? -My sister
Does she do a lot of photography? -No, not a lot
Where does she live? -Oh, in Queensland
The second style of interaction would not ask any direct questions but would,
so to speak, allow the other person to supply information:
Someone took this photo -Yes, my sister took it
Perhaps she takes lots of photos -Not so many really
She maybe lives in South Australia -She lives in Queensland

There is a sense in which this second style makes no distinction between

information-seeking questions and statements. It's a style in which you leave it
open to someone else to add information. Persons who are used to the first style
are likely to find the second style far too casual and indirect, while those who
are accustomed to the second style might find the first too demanding, even
aggressive.
Suppose, a t the very least, that Aboriginal languages make far less use
of direct questioning than English does. Then consider how important questions
and answers are in English-speaking Australia. They figure prominently in all kinds
of education - children are expected at an early age to recognise and answer
questions, especially questions asked by adults, even when it is quite obvious that
26 COLIN YALLOP

the adult already knows the answer (teachers' questions like 'what do we call a
shop where you buy meat?' or 'what is thirteen plus twelve?', or parents' questions
like 'did you draw this beautiful picture?' or, in a sterner context, 'who's left their
room in a mess again?', and so on). Later in the educational process, students are
expected to ask questions themselves and we place great value on learning to
inquire. We even make games and television programs out of questioning - quizzes,
and so on. But this is not a universal pattern of life. Once we have taken the basic
step of recognising that languages may be fundamentally different in their
grammar, it is not so difficult to see how a society might build quite differently,
regarding information as something to be shared rather than pursued, developing
conventions for inviting information without demanding it, and so on. Eades has
written about this difference in styles of interaction (Eades 1991, see also Walsh
1991) and she brings out the practical relevance of it in chapter 13.

SOME OTHER POINTS OF GRAMMAR

Some readers may be familiar with terms that are used in talking about the
grammar of English or other European languages, and should not expect all of
these terms to apply, or to apply in the same way, to Australian languages. For
example, the term 'preposition' is used to describe English words like 'in', 'at' and
'for'. But it should be clear from earlier mention of cases, that the Australian
Aboriginal equivalent of a preposition plus a noun (for example, 'in Darwin' or
'for mother') is often a suffixed noun (that is, somethinglike 'Darwin-in' or 'mother-
for'). Thus, especially in Pama-Nyungan languages with elaborate case systems,
the term 'preposition' may not be needed at all.
We have already seen that terms like 'noun', 'pronoun' and 'verb' are
relevant, even if the concepts are not quite as in English. Similarly the terms
'adjective' (for words like 'big', 'heavy' and 'good') and 'demonstrative' (for pointing
words like 'this' and 'that') do prove useful in describing Australian languages.
Again, there are significant differences as well. For example, the demonstratives
of Australian languages are usually much more complex than those of English:
there are often different words for 'this (very near)' and 'this (not very near)'
or for 'that (distant but still visible)' and 'that (not visible)'. The English distinction
between demonstrative pronouns ('that') and demonstrative adverbs ('there') may
also not apply. For instance, 'there' may be translated as 'that' with a locative
case suffix: looking at it through English wording, you say 'that-at' rather than
'there'.
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 27

In many Australian languages, there is no distinction between singular

and plural nouns. In other words, all nouns behave like English 'sheep' or 'deer'.
But some languages, including many non-Pama-Nyungan, have complex systems
of gender or noun class which may include number marking. One of the simpler
examples is Tiwi, spoken on Bathurst and Melville Islands off the north coast of
the Northern Territory. All nouns belong to one of two genders, masculine or
feminine. For example, thanqkimnqki 'white-breasted sea eagle' is masculine and
ngaringa 'black cockatoo' is feminine. But human nouns may have a masculine,
feminine and plural form (where the plural is not marked as masculine or feminine):
tini 'man' mantani 'male friend'
tinga 'woman' mantanga 'female friend'
tiwi 'people' mantawi 'friends'
Walsh gives details of a more elaborate noun class system in a non-Pama-Nyungan
language (chapter 8).
Even in languages without noun class systems, number may be evident
in other areas of the grammar. As we saw earlier in the Walmajarri examples,
number may be marked within or next to the verb. In the following example both
the -1u attached to the interrogative element nga and the -warnti suffix on the
noun are signals of the plural:
yani ngalu mangawarnti did the girls go?
The personal pronouns of Australian languages are also marked for number, dual
as well as singular and plural. Some languages also distinguish inclusive and
exclusive first person, where an inclusive 'we' includes the addressee, and a n
exclusive 'we' doesn't. Some examples from Warlpiri are given to clarify the
meanings and conventional grammatical terminology:
ngaju I first person singular
nyuntu You second person singular
ngali you & I first person dual inclusive
ngajarra we two (excl. you) first person dual exclusive
nyumpala you two second person dual
ngalipa you & I & other(s) first person plural inclusive
nganimpa we (3 +, excl. you) first person plural exclusive
nyurrula YOU (3 + second person plural
Third person forms (omitted from the Warlpiri examples above)
correspond to English 'she', 'he' and 'they'. In fact, third person pronouns are not
as common in Australian languages as in English, and absence of any pronoun
may be enough to signal third person. In other words, 'told me' may be equivalent
to 'he or she told me'. When a third person pronoun does appear, there is commonly
28 COLIN YALLOP

a single form for both male and female. In other words, there is a single word
corresponding to both 'he' and 'she'. (Bundjalung, described by Sharpe in chapter
5 is an exception to this generalisation, as are some of the northern languages
with noun class systems including masculine and feminine.)
Finally, verbs may be extremely complex in Australian languages. The
verb itself may carry a variety of suffixes to signal such distinctions as present
and past (not unlike English 'walk' and 'walked'). The verb may also be
accompanied by various auxiliary elements (again not unlike English, where
elements such as 'have' and 'will' contribute to the total meaning of verb groups
like 'have walked', 'will walk' and 'will have walked'). We have already seen in
Walmajarri that the element pa or nga following the verb distinguishes a statement
from a question. For a quite different auxiliary system, see the following Warlpiri
examples. (Note that both ngaju and -rna mean '1': the suffix represents a kind
of agreement with the independent pronoun and is attached to the verb auxiliary,
or if there is no auxiliary, to the pronoun itself.)
ngajurna purlaja I shouted, I have shouted
ngaju lparna purlaja I was shouting
ngajurna purlami I'll shout, let me shout
ngaju karna purlami I'll shout, I'll be shouting

CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have looked at just a few aspects of the grammar of Australian
languages. In some ways grammar may seem to be merely a matter of how this
language or that puts words together. But we have also seen that the grammar
of a language contains fundamental patterns that may have a lot to do with how
we view the world and how we think about reality. In particular, the assumptions
of English-speaking Australians about such things as possession and questioning
are not independent of the way we habitually express ourselves in language. We
do not want to overstate or exaggerate this point, but neither do we want to
overlook the role that language plays. The exercises below include some further
opportunities to explore the questions raised in this chapter.
Not all of the points we have mentioned here are unique to Australia.
The use of a single pronoun for both 'she' and 'he', for example, is found in many
languages around the world, including languages as diverse as Hindi, Indonesian
and Japanese. And a final reminder: there are numerous Australian languages,
each with its own grammar, and although many of them show significant
similarities, we should be very cautious about generalising across all of Australia.
Subsequent chapters of this book will continue to demonstrate the rich variety.
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

FOR DISCUSSION
1. The second section of this chapter (on 'Grammar') mentions grammatical rules
which are sometimes considered important in elegant written English but which
many people don't understand or don't obey. The particular example given was
that of the use of 'I' and 'me', where the traditional rules are strongly influenced
by Latin grammar. It is interesting in this regard that there are some similarities
between Latin and Australian languages. We saw above that many Australian
languages have different pronoun forms for actors and goals. For example in Guugu
Yimidhirr:
ngayu nhina nhaadhi I saw you
nyundu nganhi nhaadhi you saw me
Latin had a similar pattern of different pronoun forms:
ego te amo I love you
tu me amas you love me
In both Latin and Guugu Yimidhirr you would use the 'I' form of the
pronoun after a process of being (but remember that in Guugu Yimidhirr there
is actually no process expressed). In Latin you would say (for example, pointing
at a photograph) 'this is I', in Guugu Yimidhirr 'this 1'. English obviously has a
different pattern here, since we say 'this is me', but there were attempts to make
English follow the Latin pattern and many people still have a n uneasy feeling that
'this is I' is really what they ought to say. Such has been the confusion on this
point that some people now over-correct, using 'I' instead of 'me' in many instances
where the traditional rules happily accepted 'me'. For example, it was once usual
to say 'please inform my colleague or me': Latin would have used the accusative
form of 'me' here and traditional grammar therefore accepted the use of 'me'. But
some people now seem to feel it is 'more correct' to say 'please inform my colleague
or 1'.
For discussion, here are some examples of modern colloquial use of
I ' and 'me':
I'll be seeing you
I can't tell you
Me? I won't do it!
John and me will call round
You'll tell me tomorrow?
You'll tell John and me tomorrow?
As a first exercise, check what you know about Guugu Yimidhirr and
see which of these occurrences of 'I' and 'me' would translate as ngayu and which
as nganhi.
30 COLIN YALLOP

As a second exercise, try to work out what the pattern of modern

colloquial English actually is - how can you explain the use of 'I' in 'I won't do
it' but 'me' in 'John and me won't do it'? (You may find you have to explain it
by the position of the word rather than by the role which the word plays in the
sentence; and if you have access to a French grammar you may find aninteresting
parallel in the French use of moi and je.)
A third point for discussion relates to the suggestion that a language
like Guugu Yimidhirr makes a sharp distinction between a relationship of being
something and an action of doing something. What is the relevance here of the
modem English pattern of saying 'this is me' rather than 'this is I'? Does the pattern
help to make being more like doing (since 'me' seems to be the goal of an action)?
You might like also to look at the following English examples, where it might be
argued that 'being' is treated as 'doing' something:
What did you do yesterday?- I was at my brother's place.
I know I'm being a nuisance, but I want to ask you a favour.
Will you be the spokesperson?
I'll volunteer if you'll be my supporter.

2. Review the discussion in the section about the grammatical treatment of

possession ('Being and Having in Australian Languages'). In the light of the
grammar of Australian languages, is it fair to say that English projects a wide-
ranging view of possession? Consider examples of the way in which we refer to
owning our bodies, for instance in talking about donating one's body to medical
research. Or consider the way in which people to whom we are related may be
treated as possessions in our language: 'my friend', 'my father', 'my daughter',
and so on. Is this unconnected with our social behaviour and attitudes? Add other
examples that might occur to you in this connection and discuss the implications
for our view of the world. The point is not simply to praise or condemn the English
language for being different from Australian languages, but rather to explore what
social and cultural differences might be related to grammatical differences.
3. Pursuing the discussion in this chapter about questions and statements, think
about the consequences of not distinguishing between 'who took my radio?' and
'someone took my radio', or between 'what did you find?' and 'you found
something'. Add other examples of your own, again with a view to exploring just
what the differences might be between Aboriginal and English-speakingAustralia.
Here, too, the point is not to reach sweeping and oversimplified generalisations
about black Australia or white Australia, but to consider how societies and
languages can differ and how they might misunderstand each other.
THE STRUCTURE OF AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES 31

4. See how much you can work out about Walmajarri grammar from the following:
yanku palu they will go
yanku ngalu will they go?
yani palu they went
yani ngalu did they go?
yani pa he or she went
yani nga did he or she go?
yani pa manga the girl went
yani nga manga did the girl go?
yani palu mangawarnti the girls went
yani ngalu mangawarnti did the girls go?
yani palu parriwarnti the boys went
yani ngalu parriwarnti did the boys go?
yani palu, payi they went, didn't they?
yani pa manga, payi the girl went, didn't she?
yani palu parriwarnti, payi the boys went, didn't they?
yani palu they went
yani ngalu did they go?
yani pa he went
yanta go!
yantalu go (plural)
yanana pa he is going
yanku pa he'll go
yanany pa he regularly goes

REFERENCES
Blake, B.
1988 Redefining Pama-Nyungan. In N. Evans and S, Johnson (eds),
Aboriginal Linguistics 1, University of New England Press, Armidale,
1-90.
Eades, D.
1991 Communicative Strategies in Aboriginal English. In S. Romaine (ed),
Language in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
84-93.
Haviland, J.
1979 How to lklk to Your Brother-in-law in Guugu Yimidhirr. In T. Shopen
(ed), Languages and Their Speakers, Winthrop, Cambridge MA,
160-239.
Hudson, J. and E. Richards
1978 The Walrnatjari: A n Introduction to the Language and Culture,
Summer Institute of Linguistics, Darwin.
32 COLIN YALLOP

Walsh, M.
1991 Conversational Styles and Intercultural Communication: An Example
from Northern Australia, Australian Journal of Communication
18(1),1-12.
mop, c.
1977 Alyawarra: A n Aboriginal Language of Central Australia,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
 CHAPTER

LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY

COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES
1788 TO 1791

THE BEGINNING OF CONTACT

I t is well-known that on 26 January 1788 England established its first settlement

in Australia at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. Less well-known are the
linguistic consequences of that settlement. The aim of this chapter is to describe
some of the earliest linguistic interactions between the indigenous people of the
Sydney region and the members of the First Fleet who, led by Governor Arthur
Phillip, established the colony of New South Wales.
Contact between Aboriginal people and colonists first occurred a t
Botany Bay where, by 20 January 1788, the First Fleet was anchored. Simple verbal
exchanges and much use of gesture seemed to achieve the desired results, at least
from the colonists' point of view:
This appearance [of a large number of Aboriginal people]
whetted curiosity to its utmost, but as prudence forbade
a few people to venture wantonly among so great a number,
and a party of only six men was observed on the north
shore, the Governor immediately proceeded to land on that
side, in order to take possession of his new territory, and
bring about an intercourse between its old and new
masters.. . At last an officer in the boat made signs of a want
of water, which it was judged would indicate his wish of
landing. The natives directly comprehended what he
wanted, and pointed to a spot where water could be
procured.. . As on the event of this meeting might depend
so much of our future tranquillity, every delicacy on our
side was requisite. The Indians, though timorous, shewed
no signs of resentment at the Governor's going on shore;
an interview commenced, in which the conduct of both
parties pleased each other so much, that the strangers
returned to their ships with a much better opinion of the
natives than they had landed with; and the latter seemed
highly entertained with their new acquaintance, from
whom they condescended to accept of a looking glass, some
beads, and other toys. (Tench 1979, 35)
The author of this account, a senior officer named Watkin Tench, also described
an encounter during the exploration of Botany Bay:
34 JAKELIN TROY

We were met by a dozen Indians... Eager to come to a

conference, and yet afraid of giving offence, we advanced
with caution towards them, nor would they, at first,
approach nearer to us than the distance of some paces.
Both parties were armed; yet an attack seemed as unlikely
on their part, as we knew it to be on our own... After nearly
an hour's conversation by signs and gestures, they repeated
several times the word whurra, which signifies, begone, and
walked away from us to the head of the bay. (Tench 1979,
36)
The colonists decided that Botany Bay lacked the resources necessary for a
settlement. They investigated Port Jackson and chose Sydney Cove as the site for
their base. The Aboriginal people of Sydney showed some interest in the newcomers
and this encouraged Phillip in his hopes that permanent communication could
be established. His orders from the King of England were to open free
communication with the indigenous people of Australia to convince them that
although their country was to be colonised, they would be treated well and would
live in harmony with the colonists:

You are to endeavour, by every possible means, to open an

intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their
affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and
kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall
wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary
interruption in the exercise of their several occupations,
it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders
to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the
offence. You will endeavour to procure an account of the
numbers inhabiting the neighbourhood of the intended
settlement, and report our opinion to one of our Secretaries
of State in what manner our intercourse with these people
may be turned to the advantage of this colony. (George I11
1787, 485)
The establishment of a common language, at least between the colonial
administration and the local Aboriginal people, was thus a high priority for Phillip.
Aboriginal people in the Sydney area visited the settlement and
elementary communication began to develop. Phiup's strategy involved the use
of a short vocabulary of the Guugu Yimidhirr language collected by Captain James
Cook's expedition in 1770 at the Endeavour River, northern Queensland. This
language is completely different from the languages of the Sydney district and
attempts to use the vocabulary were therefore singularly unsuccessful. One product
of the experiment was that, for a while, Sydney Aboriginal people thought that
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES

the colonists' word for all animals except dogs was the word derived from Guugu
Yimidhirr 'kangaroo'. Conversely, the colonists thought the area in which they
settled had little fauna because the Aborigines called all animals 'kangaroo':
We have never discovered that.. .they know any other beasts
but the kangaroo and dog. Whatever animal is shewn them,
a dog excepted, they call kangaroo: a strong presumption
that the wild animals of the country are very few.. . Soon
after our arrival at Port Jackson, I was walking out near
a place where I observed a party of Indians, busily
employed in looking at some sheep in an inclosure, and
repeatedly crying out, Kangaroo, kangaroo! As this seemed
to afford them pleasure, I was willing to increase it by
pointing out the horses and cows, which were at no great
distance. (Tench 1979, 51)
Much later, the colonists realised that they had inadvertently taught
the local Aborigines a word from another Aboriginal language:
Kanguroo, was a name unknown to them for any animal,
until we introduced it. When I showed Colbee the cows
brought out in the Gorgon, he asked me if they were
kanguroos. ('Bench 1979, 269)
In spite of the seemingly amiable start to cross-cultural relations,
Aboriginal people very soon became offended by the presence of the colony. Phillip
was unable to prevent colonists from stealing the possessions of Aboriginal people
and physically attacking them, and the Aboriginal population retreated and refused
to have anything to do with the settlement.

THE FIRST LINGUISTIC EXPERIMENT: THE CAPTURE AND

TRAINING OF ARABANOO
Phillip was very disturbed by the breakdown in communication. He attempted
to control acts of aggression towards Aboriginal people by severely punishing
offenders. Aboriginal people also retaliated violently and Phillip feared a full-scale
war.
The need to establish communication became urgent. As it seemed
impossible to entice Aboriginal people into the settlement where linguistic
interaction could be achieved naturally, Phillip decided to capture a number of
people, force them to learn English and then use them as interpreters:
It being remarked with concern, that the natives were
becoming every day more troublesome and hostile, several
people having been wounded, and others, who were
36 JAKELIN TROY

necessarily employed in the woods, driven in and much

alarmed by them, the governor determined on
endeavouring to seize and bring into the settlement, one
or two of those people, whose language it was become
absolutely necessary to acquire, that they might learn to
distinguish friends from enemies. (Collins 1975 v01 1, 40)
In December 1788 Phillip's plan succeeded and Arabanoo became the
first Aboriginal captive of the British and thereby the first Aboriginal person to
enter into prolonged communication with the colonists. He was described as a
poor but willing learner. There is no detailed description of the processes used
in teaching him English although it is certain all the administration participated
in the endeavour. When he acquired a word, it was observed that he could
extrapolate to other similar items. Arabanoo supplied information about Aboriginal
society to the colonists and errors of understanding were corrected as
communication became more effective.
The colonists began their experiments by exposing Arabanoo to their
own culture and language and watching him for his reactions in order to understand
something of his culture and language. They noted words he used in his own
language that they supposed described his experiences:
To prevent his escape, a handcuff with a rope attached to
it, was fastened around his left wrist, which at first highly
delighted him; he called it 'Ben-gad-ee'(or ornament), but
his delight changed to rage and hatred when he discovered
its use.. .seeing the smoke of fire lighted by his country men,
he looked earnestly at it, and sighing deeply two or three
times, uttered the word 'gwekun' (fire). (Tench 1979, 141)
Eliciting Arabanoo's name proved to be a great challenge and it took until February
to solve the mystery:
Many unsuccessful attempts were made to learn his name;
the governor therefore called him Manly, from the cove in
which he was captured: this cove had received its name
from the manly undaunted behaviour of a party of natives
seen there, on our taking possession of the country. (Tench
1979, 141)
Tench attributed their eventual success to Arabanoo's increased confidence:
His reserve, from want of confidence in us, continued to
wear away: he told us his name, and Manly gave place to
Ar-ab-a-noo. (Tench 1979, 143)
The colonists' main objective was to teach Arabanoo English and 'he
readily pronounced with tolerable accuracy the names of things which were taught
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES 37

him' (Tench 1979, 140). Pictures were also employed by the colonists in their
sociolinguistic experiments with Arabanoo:
When pictures were shewn to him, he knew directly those
which represented the human figure: among others, a very
large handsome print of her royal highness the Dutchess
[sic] of Cumberland being produced, he called out, woman,
a name by which we had just before taught him to call
female convicts. Plates of birds and beasts were also laid
before him and many people were led to believe, that such
as he spoke about and pointed to were known to him. But
this must have been an erroneous conjecture, for the
elephant, rhinoceros, and several others, which we must
have discovered did they exist in the country, were of the
number. Again, on the other hand, those he did not point
out, were equally unknown to him. (Tench 1979, 140)

Music was another medium employed in Arabanoo's enculturation: '...he

had ...shown pleasure and readiness in imitating our tunes'. (Tench 1979, 142)
Arabanoo came to be well-liked by the colonists for the 'gentleness
and humanity of his disposition' (Tench 1979, 143). It was observed with approval
that:
. . When our children, stimulated by wanton curiosity, used
to flock around him, he never failed to fondle them, and,
if he were eating a t the time, constantly offered them the
choicest part of his fare. (Tfench 1979, 143)
When Hunter met Arabanoo for the first time in May 1789 he commented on his
excellent memory for names and his mild nature. He also commented on Arabanoo's
use of an Aboriginal word for boat. This indicates that Arabanoo was mixing English
and Aboriginal words when he knew the meaning would be understood:

He very soon learnt the names of the different gentlemen

who took notice of him, and when I was made acquainted
with him, he learnt mine, which he never forgot, but
expressed great desire to come on board my nowee; which
is their expression for boat or other vessel upon the water.. .
The day after I came in, the governor and his family did
me the honour to dine on board, when I was also favoured
with the company of Ara-ba-WO,whom I found to be a very
good natured talkative fellow; he was about thirty years
of age, and tolerably well looked. (Hunter 1968, 93)
Arabanoo's gradual enculturation was noted, particularly with regard
to everyday matters:
38 JAKELIN TROY

Bread he began to relish; and tea he drank with avidity:

strong liquors he would never taste, turning from them with
disgust and abhorrence. Our dogs and cats had ceased to
be objects of fear, and were become his greatest pets, and
constant companions at table. (Tench 1979, 143)
Similarly, the colonists were acquiring knowledge of Arabanoo's language and
culture, which they would later use in dealing with other Aboriginal people:
One of our chief amusements, after the cloth was removed
[that is, after dinner], was to make him repeat the names
of things in his language, which he never hesitated to do
with the utmost alacrity, correcting our pronunciation
when erroneous. Much information relating to the customs
and manners of his country was also gained from him.
(Rnch 1979, 143)
The colonists began to make use of the Aboriginal language they
learned from Arabanoo. An early example is found in Hunter's account of an
expedition to Broken Bay on 6 June 1789. After pitching their tents for the night,
at 'Pitt-Water', they found an Aboriginal woman hiding from them in the long wet
grass, unable to run away because she was weak from what was thought to be
smallpox:
She was discovered by some person who having fired at
and shot a hawk from a tree right over her, terrified her
so much that she cried out and discovered herself.. .we all
went to see this unhappy girl. ..she appeared to be about
17 or 18 years of age, and had covered her debilitated and
naked body with the wet grass, having no other means of
hiding herself; she was very much frightened on our
approaching her, and shed many tears, with piteous
lamentations: we understood none of her expressions, but
felt much concern at the distress she seemed to suffer. We
endeavoured all in our power to make her easy, and with
the assistance of a few expressions which had been
collected from poor Ara-ba-noo while he was alive, we
soothed her distress a little. (Hunter 1968, 96)
In spite of the knowledge gained from Arabanoo, Phillip's
experiment was regarded as a linguistic disappointment:
He did not want docility; but either from the difficulty of
acquiring our language, from the unskilfulness of his
teachers, or from some natural defect, his progress in
learning it was not equal to what we had expected. (Tench
1979, 150)
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES 39

Phillip's hopes that Arabanoo would be their link with the Aboriginal
population in general were finally dashed by his death on 18 May 1789 (Tench
1979, 149). Collins describes how Arabanoo cared for two Aboriginal children
during what appeared to be a smallpox plague raging amongst the Aboriginal
population. Arabanoo caught the disease and eventually succumbed:
From the first hour of the introduction of the boy and girl
into the settlement, it was feared that the native who had
been so instrumental in bringing them in, and whose
attention to them during their illness excited the admiration
of every one that witnessed it, would be attacked by the
same disorder; as on his person were found none of those
traces of its ravages which are frequently left behind. It
happened as the fears of every one predicted; he fell a
victim to the disease in eight days after he was seized with
it, to the great regret of every one who had witnessed how
little of the savage was found in his manner, and how
quickly he was substituting in its place a docile, affable,
and truly amiable deportment. (Collins 1975 v01 1, 54)
The girl (named Boorong or Abaroo) and the boy (Nanberry) continued
to live with the colonists. But they were not considered old enough to be influential,
nor competent enough in either English or an Aboriginal language to explain
Phillip's intentions to other Aboriginal people.

THE SECOND LINGUISTIC EXPERIMENT:

BENNELONG'S COOPERATION
The ability to communicate fully with the Aborigines became an increasingly
urgent concern for Phillip as attacks against lone colonists became frequent in
1789. Given the shyness of the Aborigines, official policy centred on training an
Aboriginal captive to speak English:
The want of one of the people of this country, who, from
a habit of living amongst us, might have been the means
of preventing much of this hostile disposition in them
towards us, was much to be lamented. If poor Ara-ba-noo
had lived, he would have acquired enough of our language
to have understood whatever we wished him to
communicate to his countrymen; he could have made them
perfectly understand, that we wished to live with them on
the most friendly footing, and that we wished to promote,
as much as might be in our power, their comfort and
happiness. (Hunter 1968, 114)
40 JAKELIN TROY

On 25 November 1789 Phillip detained two more men, Colbee and

Bennelong. Colbee escaped almost immediately but Bennelong was caught in the
act of following him. He was shackled and guarded by a convict and subjected
to language lessons. Bennelong was judged to be a much better language learner
than Arabanoo and he rapidly acquired enough English to communicate with the
colonists:
His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity.
He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language,
faster than his predecessor had done. He willingly
communicated information; sang, danced, and capered:
told us all the customs of his country, and all the details
of his family economy. (Tench 1979, 160)

He was described as an accomplished mimic:

He is a very intelligent man, and much information may,
no doubt, be procured from him when he can be well
understood.. . He is very good-natured, being seldom angry
at any jokes that may be passed upon him, and he readily
imitates all the actions and gestures of every person in the
governor's family. (Hunter 1968, 269)

As Tench mentions, he particularly liked imitating Phillip's French cook:

...Whom he had constantly made the butt of his ridicule,
by mimicking his voice, gait, and other peculiarities, all of
which he again went through with his wonted exactness
and drollery. (Tench 1979, 178)

Tench (1979, 176) noted that Bennelong spoke 'broken English' which suggests
that at least an incipient pidgin language had developed through the colonists'
communication with Arabanoo and then Bennelong.
Bennelong escaped from the settlement on 3 May 1790, returning many
months later, but only after much enticing by Phillip. Bennelong was able to use
his influence with both the Aboriginal people and the colonists to sustain
interaction between the groups. Aboriginal people began to visit the settlement
more often, and started to visit of their own accord unaccompanied by Bennelong.
By November 1790, Tench was able to comment that:
With the natives we are hand and glove. They throng the
camp every day, and sometimes by their clamour and
importunity for bread and meat (of which they now all eat
greedily) are become very troublesome. God knows, we
have little enough for ourselves! (Tench 1979, 192)
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES 41

The social situation created by the influx of Aboriginal people into

Sydney was conducive to the development of a pidgin language (see chapter 10
by Harris). Textual evidence of pidgin is scanty but Collins remarks that a mixed
language had developed in the colony as a result of the regular communication
between Aboriginal people and colonists:
By slow degrees we began mutually to be pleased with, and
to understand each other. Language, indeed, is out of the
question; for at the time of writing this [September 17961
nothing but a barbarous mixture of English with the Port
Jackson dialect is spoken by either party; and it must be
added, that even in this the natives have the advantage,
comprehending with much greater aptness than we can
pretend to, every thing they hear us say. (Collins 1975 v01
1, 451)
Collins's comments strongly suggest the emergence of a stable pidgin language.
His observation that Aboriginal people were the most proficient speakers of the
language suggests that they were also its principal creators. Collins also confessed
himself to be a user of the mixed language. The ethnographic data he was able
to collect using the language allowed him to make a detailed comparison of
Christian beliefs and those of the Aboriginal people familiar to him (Collins 1975
v01 1, 454-55). The mixed language must have been quite stable and must have
had a substantial lexicon for Collins to have been able to converse at the necessary
level.

INFORMAL CONTACTS
The records which remain from the period of Phillip's governorship are primarily
official and there is little evidence of informal encounters between Aboriginal
people and colonists aside from reports of attacks on convicts. Collins does report
that within the first few days of settlement in a cove a 'family' of Aboriginal people
was regularly visited:
...by large parties of the convicts of both sexes on those days
in which they were not wanted for labour, where they
danced and sang with apparent good humour. (Collins 1975
v01 1, 32)
Convicts formed the largest segment of the first colonial population and they were
not overly confined. But their opportunities to mix with Aboriginal people were
limited: they were compelled to work most of the day and they were subject to
restrictions placed on them by Phillip. Phillip's desire to keep Aboriginal people
and convicts apart was, nevertheless, very difficult to enforce given the sheer
42 JAKELIN TROY

numbers of convicts relative to the Marine guards. At the very least, some informal
linguistic interaction must have been taking place.

EXPERIENCES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE WITH

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Both Aboriginal people and colonists had difficulty with each other's languages:
But if they sometimes put us to difficulty, many of our
words were to them unutterable. The letters S and v they
never could pronounce: the latter became invariably W, and
the former mocked all their efforts...and a more
unfortunate defect in learning our language could not easily
be pointed out. (Tench 1979, 293)
The S is a letter which they cannot pronounce, having no
sound in their language similar to it. When bidden to
pronounce sun, they always say tun; salt, talt; and so of
all words wherein it occurs. (Tench 1979, 189)
Colonists acquired many Aboriginal words while interrogating
Aboriginal people in their attempt to understand and describe their new country.
Similarly, Aboriginal people interrogated colonists about their cultural artefacts
and lifestyle. While colonists seem to have been content to use Aboriginal words
for Aboriginal artefacts and many of the plants and animals new to them,
Aboriginal people coined words from their own languages in addition to acquiring
the English terms:
Their translation of our words into their language is always
apposite, comprehensive, and drawn from images familiar
to t,hem: a gun, for instance, they call Gooroobeera, that
is - a stick of fire. Sometimes also, by a licence of language,
they call those who carry guns by the same name. But the
appellation by which they generally distinguished us was
that of Bkreewolgal, meaning - m e n come from afar.
(Tench 1979, 292)
The first time Colbee saw a monkey, he called Wur-ra (a
rat); but on examining its paws, he exclaimed, with
astonishment and affright, Mul-la (a man). (Tench 1979,
270)
Arabanoo died before he re-established extended communication with
other Aboriginal people and cannot be regarded as having contributed significantly
to the early acquisition of knowledge about English by Aboriginal people.
Bennelong, on the other hand, returned to live with his people after several months
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALKS 43

of captivity amongst the colonists. It is well-attested in the literature of the period

that he was a major catalyst in disseminating knowledge about the colony and
its official language. One fragment of English that he taught other Aboriginal people
was that 'the King' was said in connection with wine drinking:
A bottle was held up, and on his being asked what it was,
in his own language, he answered, 'the King'; for as he had
always heard his Majesty's health drank in the first glass
after dinner at the governor's table, and had been made
to repeat the word before he drank his own glass of wine,
he supposed the liquor was named 'the King'; and though
he afterwards knew it was called wine, yet he would
frequently call it King. (Phillip 1789-91, 306-7)
Aborigines from Roma in Queensland still use 'king' as a generic for alcohol. (John
Ward Watkins, personal communication)

OFFICERS OF THE MARINES AND ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

Phillip strongly encouraged his officers to acquire an Aboriginal language and,
most accounts of life in the colony written during Phillip's governorship include
at least a short vocabulary and some grammatical comment about the Aboriginal
languages encountered in and around Sydney. The officers grappled with ways
to pronounce and transcribe the sounds they heard:
Not only their combinations, but some of their simple
sounds, were difficult of pronunciation to mouths purely
English: diphthongs often occur: one of the most common
is that of a e, or perhaps, a i, pronounced not unlike those
letteres [sic] in the French verb hair, to hate. The letter
y frequently follows d in the same syllable: thus the word
which signifies a woman is Dyin; although the structure
of our language requires us to spell it Dee-in. (Tench 1979,
292-93)
For two years it was believed that there was only one Aboriginal
language in the Sydney region. This fallacy was exposed when Phillip, in April
1791, explored forty miles (about sixty-four kilometres) west of Sydney to the
Hawkesbury and discovered a group of Aboriginal people with a language that
was different to that of the Port Jackson people:
Though the tribe of Buruberongal, to which these men
belonged, live chiefly by hunting, the women are employed
in fishing, and our party were told that they caught large
mullet in the river. Neither of these men had lost their front
tooth, and the names they gave to several parts of the body
44 JAKELIN TROY

were such as the natives about Sydney had never been

heard to make use of. Ga-dia (the penis), they called Cud-
da;Go-rey (the ear), they called Ben-no; in the word mi
(the eye), they pronounced the letter I as an E. And in many
other instances their pronunciation varied, so that there
is good reason to believe several different languages are
spoken by the natives of this country, and this accounts
for only one or two of those words given in Captain Cook's
vocabulary having ever been heard amongst the natives
who visited the settlement. (Phillip 1789-91, 347)
Several of the officers included in their published journals small comparative sets
of vocabulary used by people and inland people, to indicate the differences. For
example (Tench 1979, 231):
English Name on the sea Name at the
coast Hawkesbury
The Moon Ye n-ee-da Con-do-en
The Ear Goo-ree Ben-na
The Forehead Nul-10 Nar-ran
The Belly Bar-an' g Bin' -dee
The Navel Mun-ee-ro Boom-bon' g
The Buttocks Boong Bay-lee
The Neck Cal-ang Gan-ga
The Thigh T&r-a Dar-a
The Hair Dee-war-a Kee-war-a

WILLIAM DAWES AND HIS RESEARCHES

The richest source of information about a Sydney language is a collection of three
small notebooks which are held in the School of Oriental and African Studies in
London. The first notebook is catalogued as SOAS Manuscript MS.4165 (a), and
it is titled Grammatical Forms of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the Neighbourhood
of Sydney, by Dawes, in the Year 1790. It contains verb paradigms and some textual
examples as well as a few comments on grammatical aspects of the language. The
second manuscript, bound with the first and catalogued as SOAS Manuscript
MS.4165(b), is titled Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales in the
Neighbourhood of Sydney. Native and English, by Dawes. It begins with a table
of the orthography chosen by Dawes for recording his data and is mainly a lexicon
in roughly alphabetical order with longer and more numerous texts than in
manuscript (a) and with further brief grammatical comments. Held with these
notebooks is another notebook labelled SOAS Manuscript MS.4165 (c), titled
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES

Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the Neighbourhood of Sydney. (Native

and English, but not Alphabetical). It is mostly a lexical set with a few texts and
grammatical comments.
The authorship of this notebook remains controversial, but a
comparison of the two hands in the manuscript with those of other First Fleeters,
suggests that it is at least in part written by Governor Phillip himself. The rough
hand matches that of Phillip's rough hand exactly. Two First Fleet officers, David
C o b s and John Hunter, are also likely to have been contributors to the notebook.
Evidence of their authorship is found in a comment by another officer, Philip Gidley
King. King published a list of words in his journal, which he copied from a notebook
used by Phillip, Hunter and Collins and lent to him by Collins. He wrote:

I shall now add a vocabulary of the language, which I

procured from Mr. Collins and governor Phillip, both of
whom had been very assiduous in procuring words to
compose it.. .the following vocabulary, which Mr. Collins
permitted my to copy...was much enlarged by Captain
Hunter. (King 1968, 270)
The list copied by King is very similar to the list in the anonymous notebook and
the orthography used is the same. Minor differences in the lists can be attributed
to King who 'rejected all doubtful words' so that the list could be 'depended upon
to be correct' (King 1968, 270). Within the notebooks there is no name given to
the language nor is there a word for language, but the word for people is given
in several places as Iora, a name now often given to the language of Sydney.
Lieutenant William Dawes was a well-travelled and well-educated man
of twenty-six years when he came to Australia with the First Fleet as the colony's
astronomer at the suggestion of Joseph Banks. The other officers were also well-
versed in the various humanitites and sciences of the eighteenth century, but
Dawes:
. . Was the scholar of the expedition, man of letters and man
of science, explorer, mapmaker, student of language, of
anthropology, of astronomy, of botany, of surveying and of
engineering, teacher and philanthropist. (Wood, quoted in
McAfee 1981, 10)
Captain Watkin Tench testified to the excellence of Dawes' research from which
he had hoped to benefit in his own publication:
Of the language of New South Wales I once hoped to have
subjoined to this work such an exposition, as should have
attracted public notice; and have excited public esteem.
But the abrupt departure of Mr Dawes, who, stimulated
46 JAKELIN TROY

equally by curiosity and philanthropy, had hardly set foot

on his native country, when he again quitted it, to
encounter new perils, in the service of the Sierra Leona
[sic] company, precludes me from executing this part of my
original intention, in which he had promised to co-operate
with me; and in which he had advanced his researches
beyond the reach of competition. (Tench 1979, 291)
Dawes's notebooks reveal more than the grammatical and lexical
features of the language he was studying. They are also a record of his interactions
with Aboriginal people in Sydney and particularly with a young woman called
Patyegarang (or Patye as he usually called her), who was probably Dawes's main
teacher. He included notes that demonstrate that he checked his queries about
the language with her:
On saying to the two girls to try if they would correct me
Ngyine, Gonagulye, ngia, Nangadyingun. Patye did
correct me and said Bial Nangadyingun; Nangadyinye
Hence Nangadyingun is Dual We, and Nangadyinye is
Plural We. (Dawes 1790-91b)
There is also evidence within the Dawes manuscripts that he was
teaching Patye English. He wrote of his chagrin at her shyness in displaying her
reading skills:
Wurul. Wurulbadyabu Bashful. I was ashamed. This was
said to me by Patyegarang after the departure of some
strangers, before whom I could scarce prevail on her to read
2tthseptr. 1791. (Dawes 1790-91b).
When Dawes asked Patye why she cooperated in his linguistic experiments, she
frankly answered that he made her life easy:
Dawes: Minyin ngini bial piabuni whiteman? Why don't
you (scorn to) speak like a whiteman? Patye:
Mangabuninga bial. Not understanding this answer I asked
her to explain it which she did very clearly, by giving me
to understand it was because I gave her victuals, drink and
every thing she wanted, without putting her to the trouble
of asking for it. (Dawes 1790-91b)
Unfortunately, Dawes several times disobeyed orders given by Phillip
(once in an attempt to mediate on behalf of the Aboriginal population) and was
considered to be a hazard to discipline in the colony. His term of service was not
renewed despite his desire to settle in New South Wales. He was sent home to
England when Phillip was relieved in December 1791 and never returned to
Australia.
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES 47

LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE FOR LANGUAGE CONTACT IN SYDNEY

As noted above, the writings of First Fleeters contain some data that provide
evidence for the development of contact language in Sydney. Data such as Dawes'
notes on the Sydney language are an invaluable record of one colonist's attempts
to grapple with the problems caused by the lack of a common language between
himself and the Aboriginal people. His account of the Sydney language is excellent
in its detail and fulsome enough to facilitate a reconstruction of the language by
modern linguists (Osmond 1989; Troy 1992a;Wilkins forthcoming). However, within
all the linguistic data and comments on language contact produced by the First
Fleeters, there is enough evidence to suggest the early beginnings of New South
Wales Pidgin (Troy 1990 and 1992a).
The early language contact provided Australian English with some of
its core vocabulary. The following list contains words found in the Sydney language
notebooks which are now used in Australian English and must have been very
early borrowings. The words were also part of the core vocabulary of New South
Wales Pidgin (Troy forthcoming).
SYdney Meaning English Meaning
dingu dog dingo Australian native dog
wuragal large dog warrigal dingo, wild
bubuk owl boobook boobook owl
warada sceptre flower waratah waratah
wumarang scimitar, sword boomerang boomerang
bumarit scimitar, sword boomerang boomerang
WnYa house, hut gunyah temporary shelter
gawi call to come cooee a call used in the bush
giba stone, rock gibber stone, rocky outcrop
dyin wife or woman gin Aboriginal woman/wife
manuwi feet, leg mundowie foot, footstep
ngalangala a war club nulla-nulla Aboriginal war club
wumara spear throwing stick woomera spear thrower
bugi swim, bathe bogey swim, bathe
yilimung small parrying shield hieleman bark shield
garabara dance corroboree Aboriginal dance ceremony
garradjun bark fibre fishing line kurrajong kurrajong tree
The wwmarang and bumarit were different kinds of sword-like weapons which
could be used for fighting hand-to-hand or could be thrown (Troy 1992a). The
Australian English word 'boomerang' is probably a combination of the two words
which came into use in the early nineteeth century.
48 JAKELIN TROY

Aboriginal people borrowed words from English and coined new words
in their own language to provide the new vocabulary needed to describe the colonists
and their culture. The English words they borrowed were mostly for food and
artefacts - biscuit, bread, breakfast, book, handkerchief, jacket, candle, potato,
tea, sugar, window. They used both 'whiteman' and the Sydney language coinage
barawalgal as words for the colonists. The following table lists the coinages that
can be found in the Sydney language notebooks. Many of the borrowings and
coinages also became part of New South Wales Pidgin.

Coinage Meaning Derivation

barawalgal non-Aboriginal person barawal 'very far', -gal 'people'
dalangyila window glass dalang 'tongue'
djarraba musket djarraba 'fire stick, giver of fire'
garadyigan non-Aboriginal surgeon garadyigan 'healer, clever man,
sorcerer'
biscuit derivation unknown
jacket derivation unknown
house or hut gunya 'artificially constructed
shelter'
main nuwi the ship Siwks marri 'big', nuwi 'canoe'
madyi petticoat derivation unknown
namuru compass na- 'see', maru 'path'
nananyila reading glass nana- 'very see'
nanyila telescope na- see'
narang nuwi the ship Supply narang 'little', nuwi 'canoe'
ngalawi house ngalawa- 'sit', -wi 'them'
ngunmal palisade fence derivation unknown
wanyuwa horse derivation unknown
wulgan a pair of stays derivation unknown

CONCLUSION
During the governorship of Arthur Phillip permanent social relations between
Aboriginal people and colonists were established. Phillip's policy of developing
communication between the indigenous and introduced populations of New South
Wales provided the motivation for language contact. Although thwarted at first,
Phillip persisted and subjected captive Aboriginal people to linguistic experiments.
Eventually, through his own efforts and those of Bennelong, prolonged language
contact was established. The settlement provided an environment in which a pidgin
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES 49

language could develop. It is well-established that a pidgin now known as New South
Wales Pidgin had its origins in Sydney and was in regular use by the middle of the
nineteenth century (Troy 1990). The beginnings of such a pidgin can be seen in the
records of the First Fleet chroniclers.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. How did communication begin between colonists and Aboriginal people in early
colonial New South Wales?
2. Who were the key people in the establishment of communication and why were
they important?
3. What languages were used for communication between Aboriginal people and
colonists in Sydney and what was the product of contact between those languages?
4. How did the social environment of early Sydney contribute to the development
of contact language?

REFERENCES
Anon
nd Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the Neighbourhood of
Sydney. (Native and English, but not Alphabetical), School of Oriental
and African Studies manuscript MS.4165 (c).
Barton, G .
1889 History of New South Walesfrom the Records: Volume 1 - Governor
Phillip, 1783-1 789, Charles Potter, Sydney.
Collins, D.
1975 A n Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, with Remarks
o n the Dispositions, Customs, Manners, etc, of the Native Inhabitants
of that Country by David Collins Late Judge-Advocate and Secretary
of the Colony, 2 vols, v01 1 originally published 1798, v01 2 originally
published 1802. Edited by Brian H. Fletcher, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Sydney.
Dawes, W.
1790- Grammatical Forms of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the
91a Neighbourhood of Sydney, by - Dawes, in the Year 1790. School of
Oriental and African Studies manuscript MS.4165 (a).
1790- Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the Neighbourhood of
91b Sydney. Native and English, by - Dawes. School of Oriental and
African Studies manuscript MS.4165 (b).
George HI
1787 Instructions for our Trusty and Well-Beloved Arthur Phillip... Quoted
in Barton 1889, 481-87.
50 JAKELIN TROY

Hunter, J.
1968
117931 A n Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea, 1787-1 792, by
Captain John Hunter, Commander H.M.S Sirius, with Further
Accounts by Governor Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant PG. King, and
Lleutend,nt H.L. Ball. Edited by J. Bach, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
King, P.G.
1968 Lieutenant King's Journal. In Hunter 1968, 196-298.
McAfee, R.J.
1981 Dawes's Meteorological Journal, Department o f Science and
Technology, Bureau o f Meteorology, Historical Note No 2, Australian
Government Publishing Office, Canberra.
Osmond, M .
1989 A Reconstruction o f t h e Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax o f the
Sydney Language as Recorded in the Notebooks of William Dawes, term
paper, Department o f Linguistics, Australian National University.
Phillip, A.
1789-
1791 Journal o f Governor Phillip, Quoted in Hunter 1968, 299-375.
Ttench, W.
1979 Sydney's First Four Years, Being a Reprint of 'A Narrative of the
Expedition to Botany Bay' and 'A Complete Account of the Settlement
at Port Jackson' by Captain Watkin Tench of the Marines, introduction
and annotations by L.F. Fitzhardinge. Library o f Australian History,
Sydney.
Troy, J .
1990 Australian Aboriginal Contact with the English Language in New
South Wales; 1788-1845, Pacific Linguistics B-103, Canberra.
1992a The Syddney Language, J . Troy, Canberra.
1992b T h e Sydney Language Notebooks and Responses t o Language
Contract i n Early Colonial NSW, Australian Journal of Linguistics
12, 145-70.
forth-
coming Melakeuka: A History and Description o f NSW Pidgin.
 CHAPTER
TASMANIAN
ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE:
OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES

Terry Crowley

A lesson in historg
The child sits at his desk
twiddling a pencil
idly staring out the window
the teacher announces
today we will learn
about the Tasmanian Aborigines
mind snaps back to the present
the child leans forward
attention eagerly given
the last Tasmanian Aborigine
died in 1876
hand goes u p
but, teacher, I'm Aboriginal
how can you be
but teacher, I am, I a m
Mum and Dad told me
no you are not
that S' the end of i t
mouth turns down
eyes glisten and slowly fill
yes, teacher
another lesson learnt
of historical inaccuracies
closed minds and white impassivity.
Karen Brown ( d a r k 1983, 53)

THE MYTH OF EXTINCTION

T here is a widespread myth in Australia that the original inhabitants of the

island state of Tasmania were driven to extinction by colonising Europeans,
a myth which is expressed in A Lesson in History, the recent poem by Karen Brown,
a Iksmanian Aborigine. N.J.B. Plomley (1977, l), the well-known scholar of
Aboriginal history, stated quite unambiguously that 'the Tasmanian Aborigines
are an extinct people' and, furthermore, that the present-day hybrid people 'have
52 TERRY CROWLEY

no history'. The year 1876 is chosen as the end of the Tasmanian people because
it was on 8 May of that year that Truganini died in Hobart, in her sixties.
In this chapter we will see that, sad as the circumstances of Truganini's
death were, this did not mark the end of the lhsmanian people. For one thing,
Rae-Ellis (1976, 129) reports that the last recorded full-blooded Tasmanian was
in fact Sukey, who died twelve years after Truganini, in 1888, on Kangaroo Island
off the coast of South Australia. Truganini's honour was simply to have been the
last to die of the people who were rounded up by George Augustus Robinson in
the period 1829-34 and exiled to the bleak and unhealthy settlement on Flinders
Island.
Notwithstanding the death of the last full-blooded lhsmanians well
before the turn of the century, there are today about 4,000 people of Aboriginal
descent living throughout Tasmania and on the islands of Bass Strait (Clark 1983,
51). This figure represents about the same proportion of the total population of
Tasmania as the Aboriginal proportion of the total mainland population.
Recognisably non-European features can often be distinguished in the faces of
these people. Moreover, they interact socially in ways that are different from
Europeans, and they have a strong sense of their own history and of their own
belonging to Tasmania, in particular to the Bass Strait islands. Most importantly,
these people identify as Aborigines, and the world has come to hear of them in
recent years through the words and actions of political activists such as Michael
Mansell.
The history of the Tasmanian Aborigines is not, in fact, particularly
unusual in Australian Aboriginal history at all. In all main respects, what happened
to the Tasmanian Aborigines is the same as what happened to Aborigines in the
more densely settled areas of the mainland. The only major difference is that
nobody has tried to tell the Aboriginal people of Victoria, for example, that they
no longer exist.

THE DISTANT PAST: THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGES

Archaeologists tell us that the first evidence of human occupation in Tasmania
dates back to about 35,000 years ago when sea levels dropped and people were
able to migrate across from the already long-populated mainland (Flood 1983,
103-10). As sea levels began rising again about 12,000years ago, the land bridge
between Tasmania and Australia was flooded, separating the people on the
mainland from the lhsmanians, leaving them to develop culturally and adapt to
their new and changing surroundings.
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 53

In appearance, the people of Tasmania were evidently somewhat

different from the nearby mainlanders (though it should be pointed out that
mainland Aborigines are not uniform in appearance either). The most noticeable
difference involved the Melanesian-looking woolly hair of the 'fasmanians, as
against the relatively straight hair of the mainlanders, The beautiful watercolour
portraits of Tasmanian Aborigines painted by Thomas Bock in the 1830s present
facial features that are similar to those of people from some parts of Melanesia.
At around the time that Europeans first arrived in Tasmania, we know
that there were at least nine separate communities ranging in size from 250 to
700 people, making a total population of about 4,000 (Ryan 1982, 13-44). Each
of these groups was divided into smaller groups - or 'bands' - of probably between
forty and fifty people each, which roamed over a range of land together in search
of food, and were in periodic contact with other bands of the same group, and
probably those of neighbouring groups as well.

.....

.-... - - -;
,- ." .-.-.
%

..,P-,

.....,
., ,.. ;->,.,...
..... ,-., ~.
, t
---.
? .

,.. ,

3' .",
,. . &ASS STRAIT !C...
,. '0

Map 6: Tasmania, showing the regions to which vocabularies have been

assigned. Dotted line indicates earlier coastline linking Tasmania and mainland
Australia (from Crowley and Dixon 1981, 394).
54 TERRY CROWLEY

The members of those bands belonging to the same group would all
have spoken basically the same kind of language, though some bands or groups
of bands apparently spoke locally recognisable dialects of these languages. The
language of each group would probably have been fairly distinct from that of the
neighbouring group. Examining the vocabularies of the various bands for which
we have written records, as well as paying attention to what observers from the
time said about who could and who could not understand each other, it seems
that there were probably a t least eight separate languages, and possibly as many
as a dozen (Crowley and Dixon 1981, 398-403), a conclusion that is roughly
consistent with the earlier observation that there were nine distinct communities.
Unfortunately, it is impossible on purely linguistic grounds to be any
more precise than this because the records of the speech of all areas are very poor
in quality, and the records of some areas are fragmentary. Thus, it is almost
impossible to say what the 'fasmanian languages were like.
As an illustration of the difficulties we face in trying to interpret early
written sources, we find that the word for 'emu' in the South Eastern language
was recorded variously as (Plomley 1976, 147):
gon.nan.ner
gonanner
'ngunannah
nganana

(Thanks to the early European colonists, there are no longer any emus in Tasmania.)
The word probably began with the [n]sound - the sound heard at the end of
English hang or sing. But this sound does not occur at the beginning of English
words, and those who wrote 'g' a t the beginning of this word probably failed to
hear the pronunciation correctly. While we may be able to make an intelligent
guess about the pronunciation of the word for 'emu' in the South Eastern language,
other words are more difficult to reconstruct from the written record. For instance,
the word for 'ear' from the North Western language was represented variously
as follows (Plomley 1976, 113):

These words were all recorded by one person on different occasions,

and exactly what was the shape of the first syllable is almost anybody's guess.
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 55

THE COLONIAL IMPACT

Despite occasional contacts between Tasmanian Aborigines and European sailors
from as early as 1772, contacts between the two peoples did not commence in
earnest until the early nineteenth century. In 1804 Lieutenant-Governor Collins
arrived to set up a convict colony near what is now Hobart. Among his papers
was an instruction similar to that given to Governor Phillip in New South Wales.
He was to:
endeavour by every means in your power to open an
intercourse with the natives and to conciliate their
goodwill, enjoining all persons under your Government to
live in amity and kindness with them.. .. (quoted in Turnbull
1948, 20)
The European population of the colony grew rapidly, and quickly overtook the
Aboriginal population. About half of the Europeans were convicts, while the
remainder were military officers and free settlers who took up land and developed
farms in the rural areas.
The early European settlers found life in the new colony much harsher
than did the Aborigines, who had a superior knowledge of what the land had to
offer. The Europeans came to rely heavily on kangaroo meat for sustenance,
thereby encroaching on Aboriginal hunting areas to obtain their supplies (Turnbull
1948,38). As the Aborigines came to be deprived of their own food by Europeans,
incidents began to take place in which Europeans' houses were raided for flour
(Turnbull 1948, 42).
The official policy of the administration, however, was to discourage
hostility and to prevent the frequent instances of unprovoked cruelty that the
Europeans often inflicted upon the Aborigines. In 1828 Governor Arthur had boards
nailed to trees in the bush, depicting peace and happiness if the law was obeyed,
and equal punishment for Aborigines and settlers if it was broken (see Plate 1).
As European settlement spread further into the rural areas, Aborigines
were less and less able to avoid contacts with Europeans, and they found that
their food resources were increasingly coming under pressure. As a result, the
1820s saw a significant increase in hostile contacts between the two peoples. The
result was the decree of 1828 in which Arthur effectively stated his intention to
impose a partition of Tasmania. Under the provisions of this proclamation,
Aborigines were forbidden to enter into defined settled areas, except with special
'passports'. The perimeter of these areas was to be policed by a series of military
posts (Turnbull 1948, 85).
Partition failed. Rural Aborigines, still for the most part speaking no
English, did not understand the proclamation, and it was unenforceable in any
56 TERRY CROWLEY

Plate 1: The pictures on the boards Governor Arthur ordered nailed to trees
in 1828 (courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 57

case. Conflicts continued, and Governor Arthur was forced to look to other
solutions to his problems.
In 1830, he decreed that every male settler was to make himself
available to his local magistrate and, in a vast military operation, the entire settled
area of the colony was to be systematically scoured. A giant pincer movement
was to force those Aborigines still remaining at large onto the 'fasman Peninsula,
which was attached to the mainland by the easily guarded narrow Eaglehawk Neck.
This operation - the so-called 'Black Line' - was also a total failure. Only one
old man and a boy were captured (Clark 1983, 40), at a cost of £35,000Five or
six soldiers died in accidents (Turnbull 1948, 199).
After this failure, conflicts between Aborigines and Europeans in
settled areas continued to be reported. The colonial administration saw as the
last hope the commissioning of George Augustus Robinson to directly contact those
Aborigines living in the bush and to persuade them to relocate to an island in Bass
Strait, where they would be cared for by the government. Between 1829 and 1834,
Robinson was successful in gathering together all the remaining Aborigines and
they were relocated ultimately to a settlement on Flinders Island where they were
to be 'civilised' and Christianised.
By 1835, after three decades of conflict, the Aboriginal population had
declined from about 4,000 to a couple of hundred. Severely reduced birth-rates,
poor health as a result of loss of hunting grounds and introduced diseases, and
murder were the main reasons for the sharp reduction in numbers. The total
number of Europeans killed by Aborigines during the same period of conflict was
183 ( d a r k 1983, 41).

NON-PASTORAL CONTACTS: THE BEGINNINGS OF A NE W

LANGUAGE

Appalling as the history of race relations described in the preceding section was,
conflict was probably inevitable: the Aborigines needed the land for gathering
and hunting, and the Europeans wanted it for pastoral purposes. But a very
different pattern of race relations was evolving at the same time outside the
pastoral sector of the economy and beyond the area of government control in the
islands of Bass Strait.
Seals were abundant on the Bass Strait islands. Even before the
establishment of the first government convict settlement near Hobart, sealing ships
from as far afield as Sydney, the United States and the United Kingdom had been
taking skins from Bass Strait (Ryan 1982, 66). A pattern of mutually beneficial
contacts quickly emerged between these sealers and the local Aborigines on the
58 TERRY CROWLEY

adjacent mainland, with Aborigines exchanging seal and kangaroo skins for
tobacco, flour and tea (Ryan 1982, 67).
It was a fact of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that the men seldom
learned to swim: when they needed to cross a body of water, they were often
ferried across on rafts by the women, who were proficient swimmers. The
Aboriginal men were therefore of limited use as labourers to the sealers, but the
women proved to be invaluable. Ryan (1982, 67) reports that by 1810, local
Aborigines had begun to gather along the northeast coast in anticipation of the
seasonal arrival of the sealers, and a number of Aboriginal women would be offered
for the season as labourers (and as sexual partners), for which the men were
compensated with dogs (which were new to the Tasmanians), muttonbirds and
flour.
A number of sealers - often convicts and ex-convicts - gradually
settled permanently on various Bass Strait islands. None of these islands had a
permanent Aboriginal population a t the time of European contact, and far from
representing a threat to the Aborigines on the adjacent mainland, the presence
of these sealers was generally regarded in the early years as beneficial (though
relationships deteriorated when the proportion of women in the population was
reduced as a result of kidnapping and increased death rates among Aborigines).
The sealers generally took numbers of Aboriginal women as labourers and wives
(Ryan 1982, 67) and by 1820, there were about fifty European men and about
a hundred Aboriginal women (and their mixed-race children) living on various
islands throughout Bass Strait (Ryan 1982, 69).
Seal numbers declined and so, too, did the size of the sealing population.
By 1830, there were seventy-four Aboriginal women living with the remaining
European sealers in Bass Strait, twenty-eight of whom came from the North
Eastern community, twenty-one from the North Western community, and the
remainder from a variety of other eastern Tasmanian groups (Ryan 1982, 71). The
Bass Strait community also included a few mainland Aborigines, and this ethnically
mixed group became the nucleus of the surviving Aboriginal population in
Tasmania today (Ryan 1982,71). Eventually, because of the shortage of seals, the
sealers who remained were forced to shift their economic activity to the seasonal
gathering of muttonbirds, which were valuable for their oil.
In the preceding chapter, Jakelin Troy has described the emergence
of a pidgin in early colonial Sydney. The Bass Strait sealing trade between about
1800 and the 1830s was another situation in which such a pidgin might have
developed for use between the European sealers and the Aboriginal women. Those
Aboriginal women, both from Tasmania and the mainland, who did not share
common languages would have been able to use such a language amongst
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 59

themselves as well. Ryan (1982, 150) and Plomley (1976, 59-60) both report that
these women had indeed formed a new 'lingua franca', or contact language. From
historical references, we can say very little about what this pidgin spoken in Bass
Strait was like, other than that it comprised mostly English vocabulary - as we
would predict - along with an admixture of local Aboriginal words, predominantly
from the various languages of the numerically dominant eastern part of Tasmania.
From elsewhere in Tasmania at the same period, Rae-Ellis (1976, 22)
reports that Truganini, then a sixteen-year-old, began to take a keen interest in
the European men at a government timber cutting settlement on the mainland
adjacent to her native Bruny Island in the southeast. She and her Bruny Island
female friends were also frequently found consorting with European convicts,
sealers and whalers when they called in at the area. What we would expect is
that Truganini and her friends would also have ended up picking up a form of
pidgin. Almost certainly the whalers they came into contact with would have
spoken to them in what has come to be known as South Seas Jargon, which was
the incipient pidgin widely spoken on whaling vessels around the Pacific at the
time (and from which many later pidgins in the southwest Pacific ultimately
evolved).
Truganini (see Plates 2 and 3) and her Bruny Island people also had
close contact with Robinson from the time that he attempted to establish a
government settlement on Bruny Island in 1829, and subsequently when Truganini
accompanied him on his travels around Tasmania to round up the last groups of
Aborigines still living in the bush. Robinson is often quoted as having spoken 'the
Aboriginal language', a quality which he considered particularly qualified him for
his role as 'conciliator'. Many sources (for example, Rae-Ellis 1988) also indicate
that Robinson was a man of limited intellect - and even dishonesty - who tended
to exaggerate his achievements. As Plomley (1976,34) points out, while Robinson's
diaries provide plentiful examples of Tasmanian vocabulary, there is no evidence
that he acquired any real knowledge of the grammar of these languages.
For instance, in 1829 Robinson claimed that while on Bruny Island he
'preached to the Aborigines in their own tongue' (Plomley 1966, 61). Given that
he had only been on the island for eight weeks a t the time, this would seem to
be a somewhat presumptuous claim. The extract from the relevant section of his
journal reads as follows (Plomley 1966, 61):
At 11 am performed divine service in the natives' hut. Four
of the prisoners attended. Preached to the aborigines in
their own tongue. Part of the sermon - MOTTI (one)
NYRAE (good) PARLERDI (God) MOTTI (one) NOVILLY
(bad) RAEGEWROPPER (devil). PARLERDI (God) NYRAE
60 TERRY CROWLEY

Plate 2: Truggernana (1837), watercolour 29.2 X 22 (courtesy Tasmanian

Museum and Art Gallery).
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 61

(good). PARLERDI (God) MAGGERER (stop)

WARRANGELLY (sky), RAEGEWROPPER (devil)
MAGGERER (stop) TOOGENNER (below) UENEE (fire).
NYRAE (good) PARLERWAR (native) LOGERNER (dead)
TAGGERER (go) TEENY (road) LAWWAY (up)
WARRANGELLY (sky) PARLERDI (God) NYRAE (good)
RAEGE (whiteman) etc, etc. NOVILLY (bad) PARLEWAR
(native) LOGGERNER (dead) TAGGERER (go) TEENNY
(road) TOOGUNNER (below) RAEGEWROPPER (devil)
UENEE (fire) MAGGERER (stop) UENEE (fire).
The text of his sermon contains words strung together in an order that is identical
to English, but stripped of all grammatical markers such as suffixes and
prepositions. What this text looks like, in fact, is a pidgin in which the English
lexicon has been systematically replaced by vernacular words.
Thus Truganini would have been supplied with a variety of inputs from
which she presumably worked out some form of communication that she could
use with Europeans and with Aborigines from other areas. Exactly what was the
nature of the 'English' that Truganini eventually learned is impossible to say.
Despite various claims in Robinson's official reports that Truganini learned to speak
English 'fluently' (Turnbull 1948, 203-5), he admitted in his private diaries that
none of the Tasmanian Aborigines ever learned to speak English 'properly' ( h e -
EUis 1988, 127). For instance, Sir Charles Du Cane, a one-time governor of Tasmania
and an acquaintance of Truganini in her late years, reported that:
every now and then [she] paid us a visit of ceremony at
Government House where she would laugh and
chuckle...and occasionally savour us with a few words of
English. On one occasion she eyed me intently...and said
'This fellow he too much jacket' meaning thereby that I
had become stouter than comported with her notions of
vice-regal dignity. (quoted in he-Ellis 1988, 46)
If this utterance was typical of Truganini's speech in her old age, and in the
company of the Governor, presumably she used pidgin throughout her life in her
dealings with all Europeans.
Contacts of a similar sort to Truganini's were repeated all over the
settled areas of Tasmania between the beginning of European settlement and the
1820s. By 1822, there was one band of acculturated Aborigines in the Oyster Cove
area known as the 'tame mob'. No longer dependent on the resources of the bush
for their survival, they begged for food, tobacco and alcohol, and suffered from
lack of hygiene and associated health problems (Turnbull 1948, 61-62). This band
was headed by an Aboriginal convict from Sydney named Mosquito. Mosquito is
62 TERRY CROWLEY

Plate 3: Woureddy (1837), watercolour by Thomas Bock, 29.5 X 22.3 (courtesy

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).
T A S M A N I m ABORIGINAL M G U A G E 63

quoted in Turnbull (1948, 63) as having said:

I stop wit white fellow, learn to like blankets, clothes,
bakky, rum, bread all same white fellow: white fellow give'd
me. By and by Gubernor send me catch bushranger -
promise me plenty clothes and send me back Sydney, my
own country: I catch him, Gubernor tell too much a lie,
never send me. I knockit about camp, prisoner no liket me
then, givet me nothing, call me bloody hangman nose. I
knock one fellow down, give waddie, constable take me,
I then walk away in bush. I get along wid mob, go all about
beg some give it bread, blanket: some take't away my gin:
that make a fight: mob rob the hut: some one tell Gubernor:
all white fellow he never give, mob make a rush, stock-
keeper shoot plenty, mob spear some. Dat de way me no
come all same your house. Never like see Gubernor any
more. White fellow soon kill all black fellow. You good
fellow, mob no kill you.
A number of features of later Aboriginal or South Pacific Pidgins were already
present in the speech of Mosquito, such as the use of 'stop' to mean 'stay', 'all
same' to mean 'like', 'by and by' to mark the future tense, 'plenty' as a marker
of the plural before nouns, the suffix Lit' as a marker of transitive verbs, and 'no'
as a negative marker before verbs. Given that Mosquito was regarded as the leader
of this 'tame mob', it is likely that other members of this community also spoke
this pidgin by the 1820s.

THE GOVERNMENTCONTROLLED COMMUNITY

Despite the mortal threat they were believed to pose in the settled areas, only
135 Aborigines from all parts of the colony remained in the bush to be rounded
up by the early 1830s. They were removed from the mainland and settled ultimately
into a single community on F'linders Island. Coming from all different areas, they
spoke a variety of languages.
Given that a form of pidgin was probably already spreading among
lhsmanian Aborigines in the 1820s, this set of circumstances would have been ripe
for the further spread and development of this new contact language. Access to
English on Flinders Island would have been less than in the sealer communities,
where each working group included at least one European male. Thus, we might
expect that any contact language that was used on F'linders Island would have
contained a higher proportion of Aboriginal words than was the case with the
sealers' women's pidgin. Some Aborigines, such as Truganini herself, arrived at
Flinders Island with a fair knowledge of some form of pidgin already, and there
64 TERRY CROWLEY

was also some direct input from the pidgin spoken in Bass Strait as Robinson
succeeded in forcing some of the sealers' women into the government settlement.
There was also further contact with mainland varieties of Aboriginal Pidgin, as
Fabinson took thirteen Tasmanian Aborigines with him for a time when he was
transferred to Port Phillip in what is now Victoria in 1839 (Rae-Ellis 1976,34-38).
Davies, a sailor, made several voyages to the Flinders Island settlement between
1832 and 1837, and he noted that:
The Aborigines from the westward, and those from the
eastward, did not at first understand each other, when
brought to Flinders Island.. .but they afterwards, in common
with the whites, used a kind of lingua franca. (quoted in
Plomley 1976, 79)

Bonwick (1870, 153) also reports the catechist Clark on the island as saying: '...on
my first joining them in 1834, I found them instructing each other to speak their
respective tongues'. He also reports that in this settlement 'they had constructed,
by force of circumstances, a sort of Linguu f r u m u - a common language' (Bonwick
1870, 153). Clark apparently learned to use the 'gibberish peculiar to the
settlement', a fact which was condemned by Robinson (Rae-Ellis 1988, 174). A
Board of Enquiry set up to investigate Robinson's administration of the Flinders
Island settlement and his claim to have 'civilised' the Aborigines, and to have taught
them English, reported finding Aborigines participating in church services only
in what it called 'broken dialect' (Rae-Ellis 1988, 169-70). Dr Henry Jeanneret,
a medical superintendent at Flinders Island, also reported that the people there
spoke a '. ..barbarous English.. .replete with native words and pronounced with
little regard to the distinctions of consonants...' (quoted in Rae-Ellis 1988, 113).
We will never know the exact nature of this language, though it is
almost certain that it was a variant of the same pidgin that was in use in Bass
Strait and which had previously been in use in various parts of rural Tasmania.
Plomley (1976,391 quotes a manuscript reference from the catechist Clark in 1837
which bears out the earlier prediction that it would have contained a substantial
proportion of non-Enghsh vocabulary:
Noemy, after some introductory observations in his native
language, commenced speaking in the dialect of the
settlement -
God narrucoopu [good]. He coethee [loves]us, you coethee God, coetke
plenty a big one you tupLuldy [go] weethicuLLee [heaven?]. God sent
Jesus Christ to save us to purruwuy [chase away] the Devil, pother
[if?] you c o e t k the Devil, purruwuy coethe God coethe Jesus Christ
the son of God. You tapludy lu,thru [hell?] you coethe you norocoopa
God make you good man, go top wiethienettu [heaven?].
TASMANIAN BORIGINAL LANGUAGE 65

Another manuscript reference from Clark to Robinson in 1837 quotes the dying
words of an Aborigine on Flinders Island, which reflect a similarly mixed lexicon:
I said to Hector 'you are very sick?' Hector 'yes m e p k n t y
m n a t y ' [sick]. You coethee God? Hector 'yes me coethee
plenty'. You coethee Jesus Christ? '%S m e coethee Jesus
Christ the son of Gbd'. Do you pray to him? '%S me pray
to h i m plenty, m e pray last night our Father which art in
heaven pky~tg'.You very sick you krakabuka [die] by and
bye? '%S me talbetee werthickathe [?lto God, me coethee'.
(quoted in Plomley 1976, 39-40)
Finally, Robinson quotes the words of an Aborigine in an official report explaining
his absence from the settlement:
Blackfellow no come back. Too much sickness at Flinders
at Pea Jacket Point. l b o much dead man. Blackman
frightened like to crackenny [die] bust. (quoted in &e-Ellis
1988, 128)
By the time that the Flinders Island settlement was established, the Aboriginal
birthrate had dropped catastrophically. For example, one tribe, which had formerly
numbered about 500 people, by 1830 consisted of just seventy-two men, six women
and no children (Clark 1983,441, and by 1832 the whole Flinders Island community
consisted of twenty-six men, thirteen women, but only one child (Turnbull 1948,
145). This was due to a combination of circumstances, which presumably included
the severe imbalance between males and females (largely a result of women being
abducted by European seales), stress, and health problems brought about by food
shortages and introduced syphilis. Conditions on the Bass Strait settlements were
so uniformly bad that the death rate among residents was phenomenal. Of the
135 people who had been relocated from the mainland to the Flinders Island
settlement by 1834, only forty-seven survived by 1847. Most of the casualties
succumbed to lung infections and other avoidable diseases. To replace those who
had died during the same period there were only fourteen births (Turnbull 1948,
222).
Because of the appalling mortality rate, the government decided in
1847 to move the community back to the mainland, to a new settlement at Oyster
Cove, south of Hobart (Turnbull 1948, 225). In their new location, the members
of this sad little community continued to die one by one. William Lanney, the last
of the men of this community, died in 1867, and Truganini was the last of the
women to die, in Hobart, in 1876. After her burial, Truganini's body was exhumed
and her bones were placed on public display in a glass case in the nsmanian
Museum. According to her final request, she was eventually buried at sea near
66 TERRY CROWLEY

her home of Bruny Island on the centenary of her death, in 1976 (Rae-Ellis 1988,
41).

THE LINGERING LANGUAGE

The Tasmanian languages were probably doomed well before Truganini's death.
The nature of the linguistically fragmented Flinders Island settlement as far back
as the 1830s was sufficient to ensure that the languages had no viable future, and
the sealer communities could not ensure the survival of the languages either.
Children born in the Flinders Island settlement? such as Fanny Cochrane Smith
and William Lanney? probably acquired only a very limited knowledge of the
language of their parents. Bsmanian Aboriginal Pidgin was probably the only
commonly used language.
It is likely that if this community had been able to maintain itself for
another generation? with full-blooded Tasmanians surviving into the twentieth
century? these people would probably have ended up speaking English, just as
Aborigines in many parts of Victoria and New South Wales today do. Although
Robinson was trying to force people to give up their traditional songs and dances?
he evidently did not try to force them to give up their languages. He did not need
to, as the languages would have disappeared simply because of the nature of the
social context into which the people had been forced,
Although Truganini and people like her spent their early years speaking
nothing but their ancestral language?and did not learn some form of English until
at least adolescencel the original languages did not disappear completely with the
death of these 'old-timers'. Fanny Cochrane Smith was born in 1834 on Flinders
Island from an Aboriginal mother and a European sealer father. She eventually
married a European?and lived until 1905. In 1899, and again in 1903?the Fbyal
Society of Tasmania recorded her singing Aboriginal songs?which she had learned
as a child on Flinders Island (presumably in secret, given Fbbinson's attitude to
Aboriginal songs). The technology of the time was so poor that these recordings
sound like little more than a scratchy squawk. Fanny Cochrane Smith and others
obviously did manage to learn some words and expressions of the languages of
their parents because she and the generations that followed her were still able
to transmit some linguistic remnants to their own children.
In 1908-10, Ernest Westlake interviewed about thirty people of
Aboriginal descent in Tasmania and gathered around 100 words (Plomley 1976,
56-67). Fanny Cochrane Smith's daughter?Mary Jane Miller, was one of the people
interviewed by Westlake?and she was interviewed again by Archibald Meston in
1941-421 when she was able to supply nineteen words that she had learned from
her mother (Crowley and Dixon 19811397).
T A S M A N I m ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE

Other people of msmanian Aboriginal descent also retained some

knowledge of remnants of the old languages. In the 1 9 3 0 the
~ ~ anthropologist N.B.
Tindale interviewed descendants of Thsmanian women and European sealers on
Kangaroo Island, from whom he recorded four phrases of Thsmanian language
(Tindale 1937, 36). Tindale's 1939journal from Cape Barren Island also included
a few words and a single sentence, which were published for the first time in
Crowley and Dixon (1981, 397).
In Thsmania in 1972, I interviewed Mrs Heffernan and Mrs Mundy,
who are two of the granddaughters of Fanny Cochrane Smith. Mrs. Heffernan
remembered begging her mother to tell her anything of the old language that she
knew, though neither she nor her mother (nor probably even her grandmother)
ever used the language for communicative purposes. The words that I recorded
were all pronounced with normal Australian English phonologyl and the word
langana that she gave as the word for 'foot' was even given with the English plural
suffix '-S'. Mrs Heffernan also remembered a whole sentence? which she pro-
nounced with a fairly typical Australian English accent as if it were spelt as follows:
mbbenty ning-ena moomera probbeby par-drooler.
This meant? she explained, 'Get a bit of wood and put it on the fire'. Finally? she
also remembered a fragment of a song that she said was sung by her grandmother
before an audience at Government House in Hobart. The meaning of the song is
unknown, but it went as follows (Crowley and Dixon 1981, 398):
Kumerayngo kunekuneli
Rrpa rrpa hiriyawa tachima tachima
Although the Thsmanian languages are now extinct, it is testimony to the power
of the Thsmanian Aboriginal sense of identity that scraps such as these should
have survived in people's memories for almost a century-and-a-half.

MAINTAINING A LINGUISTIC IDENTITY

People who lose their original language by the force of circumstances beyond their
control often maintain their distinct identity using the language of their oppressors.
For instance, even when speaking English, Aboriginal people prefer indirect
methods of seeking information? rather than the direct questioning approach of
Europeans (compare comments on this in other chapters of this book, especially
chapters 2 and 13 by Yallop and Eades respectively). The differences between a n
Aboriginal way of speaking and a European way of speaking in situations such
as these may be lost on the average European unless they are carefully pointed out.
A separate Thsmanian Aboriginal linguistic identity did not disappear
completely with the loss of the original languages?just as the lbmanian Aborigines
68 TERRY CROWLEY

themselves did not disappear. Through the remainder of the nineteenth century
and early twentieth century, the mixed-race descendants of the Bass Strait sealers
continued to raise pigs and goats, grow wheat and potatoes, and catch kangaroos,
seals and muttonbirds for their sustenance; and the women continued to make
necklaces made of small shells ( d a r k 1983, 47). Although the government
negotiated leases for the land they were occupying in the nineteenth century, there
were problems over access to muttonbird rookeries, and an area was set aside for
a single reserve on Cape Barren Island (Ryan 1982, 222-27). In 1951 this reserve
was abolished on the grounds that the occupants were 'no longer Aborigines'.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth
century, these people often called themselves 'Islanders', but from the early 1970s
they began to refer to themselves again proudly as Aboriginal Tasmanians (Ryan
1982, 253).
English was the language of this new Cape Barren Island Aboriginal
community, though the people retained a knowledge of some words in the
Aboriginal languages passed on to them by their mothers and their grandmothers.
The descendants of these people still live today on Cape Barren Island and they
still hunt muttonbirds. They still make shell necklaces, from the shells which they
call 'mariners' - a word which is also recorded in the vocabularies of Tasmanian
languages from a century-and-a-half ago (Plomley 1976, 326). West (1984, 15, 75)
reports a number of other words in use in English among Bass Strait Aborigines
which may also be of Aboriginal origin:

barilla saltbush
bidgie-widgie burr
kanie gan pigface
boobyalla baby food
ne na amen

The English spoken by the Tasmanian Aboriginal residents of Cape

Barren Island today is noticeably distinct from other varieties of Australian English.
Sutton (1975, 65) notes that 'traces of early nineteenth-century or dialectal British
English, and traces of Aboriginal foreign accent, are clearly discernible.. .in.. .Cape
Barren English'. For instance, there are people on Cape Barren Island who
pronounce 'follow' and 'swallow' as 'folly' and 'swally' respectively, which are
also characteristic pronunciations in certain Scottish and southwestern English
dialects of English (Sutton 1975, 69). Sutton (1975, 82) also notes that a certain
amount of variation between sounds such as [v] and [b] in Cape Barren English
may derive from the fact that the original Tasmanian Aboriginal languages did
not make this distinction.
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 69

There are also English words that occur only on Cape Barren Island,
or which occur elsewhere but have special uses among the people there. Sutton
(1975, 90-95) notes that what most Australians call a 'house' is referred to there
as a 'bungalow', and people use 'chains' as a measure of distance in addition t o
yards (or metres). 'Getting dark' is 'getting duskified'. What most Australians would
call 'chooks' or 'chickens' are referred to there as 'fowls' (as is also widely found
among mainland Aboriginal speakers of English).
Probably for as long as the Tasmanian Aborigines living on Cape Barren
Island feel different from other people in Australia, they will continue to speak
their own variety of English.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Languages can die out in a number of different ways. What can you find out
about how other languages have disappeared (or show signs that they may
disappear)? How do these compare with what happened in Tasmania? Case studies
that you could investigate include the following:
Any mainland Aboriginal language (check some of the other chapters of this
book)
Hawaiian
Moriori (formerly spoken on the Chatham Islands in New Zealand)
Cornish or Manx
2. 'Languages generally don't die, they commit suicide.' What do you think this
means? Did the Tasmanian languages commit suicide or were they murdered?
3. If you had been in Governor Arthur's position in 1830, what might you have
done to ensure that the Tasmanian languages survived to the present? (check some
of the other chapters of this book)
4. If you were doing research on your family history and you discovered that
your great-great-great-grandmother was a Tasmanian Aborigine, would that make
you an Aborigine?

REFERENCES
Bonwick, J.
1870 Daily Life and Origins of the Tasmanians, Sampson, Low, Son and
Marston, London.
Clark, J.
1983 The Aboriginal People of Tasmania, Tasmanian Museum and Art
Gallery, Hobart.
70 TERRY CROWLEY

Crowley, T. and R.M.W. Dixon

1981 Tasmanian. In R.M.W. Dixon and B.J. Blake (eds), Handbook of
Australian Languages, v01 2, Australian National University Press,
Canberra, 394-421.
Eades, D.
1985 "You Gotta Know How to Talk". .. Information Seeking in South-East
Queensland Aboriginal Society. In J.B. Pride (ed), Cross Cultural
Encounters: Communication and Mis-Communication, River Seine
Publications, Melbourne, 91-109.
Elder, B.
1988 Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian
Aborigines since 1788, Child and Associates, Frenchs Forest, New
South Wales.
Flood, J.
1983 Archaeology of the Dreamtime, Collins Publishers, Sydney.
Plomley, N.J.B.
1966 Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals of George Augustus
Robinson 1829-34, Tasmanian Historical Research Association,
Kingsgrove, New South Wales.
1976 A Word-Listof the Thsmanian Aboriginal Langztages, N.J.B. Plomley,
Launceston.
1977 The Thsmanian Aborigines: A Short Account of Some Aspects of Their
Life, Adult Education Division, Launceston.
Rae-Ellis, V.
1976 Trucanini: Queen or Traitor?, O.B.M. Publishing Company, Hobart.
1988 Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne University Press,
Melbourne.
Ryan, L.
1982 The Aboriginal Tasmanians, University of Queensland Press, St
Lucia, Queensland.
Sutton, P.
1975 'Cape Barren English'. In J.V. Neustupny (ed), Linguistic
Communications 13: Working Papers of the Linguistic Society of
Australia, Monash University, Melbourne, 61-97.
Tindale, N.B.
1937 Tasmanian Aborigines on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, Records
of the South Australian Museum 6, 29-37.
Turnbull, C.
1965
[l9481 Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines,
Lansdowne Press, Melbourne.
TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 71

West, I.
1984 Pride Against Prejudice: Berniniscences of a Thsmanian Aborigine,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

NOTE
I would like to thank Diana Eades for helpful comments on earlier versions of
this paper. All responsibility for interpretation is, of course, my own.
 CHAPTER

5 BUNDJALUNG:
TEACHING A
DISAPPEARING LANGUAGE

Margaret Shuqwe

INTRODUCTION

B undjalung is the name given to the language spoken in the area shown in
the map (Map 7). We spell it Bundjalung so that the average English
speaker will read and pronounce it correctly, as desired by Bundjalung people.
In some publications for linguistically trained readers, the name is spelt Bandjalang,
but the a is meant to indicate a vowel like that of English bun or lung rather than
that of ban or Lang.
As Map 7 shows, there were various dialects of Bundjalung. Most of
these had names which the speakers themselves or their neighbours used to
identify some characteristic of the dialect. For example, the Minyangbal people
are those who use the word rnini/ang (meaning 'what?'), whereas the Nyangbal
people are those who say nyang for 'what?'. Similarly, names like Wiyabal,
Wuyehbal, Wahlubal and so on, are based on different words for 'you (singular)',
all of them carrying the suffix -bal meaning 'those who say'.
My own experience of Bundjalung began in 1965 when I went to
Woodenbong in northern New South Wales to record information on the Yugambeh
dialect of Bundjalung from a man who was considered to be the last person with
significant knowledge of this dialect. At that time there was a big drive in Australia
to record 'dying' languages and dialects. There was also great concern to get 'pure'
language, not 'contaminated' with English, and to carefully record differences
in neighbouring dialects. Two members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
Brian and Helen Geytenbeek, were living at Woodenbong a t the time, with the
aim of translating the Bible into the Gidhabal dialect. There were then a number
of fluent speakers of that dialect at Woodenbong. The Geytenbeeks later spent
some time at Tabulam, where it appeared that a greater number of younger people
spoke some Bundjalung. But they eventually came to the conclusion that a
simplified English Bible translation would be far more use to the Woodenbong and
"fabulam people than a Bundjalung one would be. All people spoke English, and
younger people did not know much Bundjalung.
There are still a few people who can speak the language fluently and
who use it with each other, though for a restricted range of functions. A good
number of people of all ages (including children) use some Bundjalung words in
their English (for such things as turtle, echidna, witchetty grubs, bodily functions,
74 MARGARET SHARPE

Map 7: Approximate location of the Bundjalung-Yugam dialects. The broken line

encloses the approximate dialect ranges of the language. The unbroken line
encloses the Bundjalung dialects (taken with permission from Sharpe et a1 1985,
xviii).

food and cigarettes), and a number (particularly at Baryulgil) use some Bundjalung
phrases within English. There have also been school language programs and courses
in Bundjalung held not only in northern New South Wales, but also in southern
Queensland and in Victoria. Bundjalung people and some non-Aboriginal people
have been keen to know more about the language: some courses have been
instigated by Bundjalung people; others by non-Bundjalung Aboriginal people; and
some by non-Aboriginal people, including school staff and others. In these courses
constant issues for organisers and students are: what is the 'correct' word or phrase
to teach, the 'correct' pronunciation; why are there variant forms; and which of
the variant forms should be used?
BUNDJALUNG 75

THE SPECIAL PLACE OF BUNDJALUNG

Bundjalung is unusual in New South Wales, and indeed in Australia, for two reasons.
The first is that it has been studied for a relatively long time; the second, that
there are still some people living who learned it as their first language, even in
one of the most densely populated rural areas of Australia.
There are word lists in Curr (1886-87), and a useful if brief grammar
of the Minyang (Brunswick River) dialect published in 1892. A grammar and
vocabulary of the Wangerriburra clan of the Beaudesert area was published in
1913, CO-authoredby a Wangerriburra man (Bulam or John Alien) who had used
the language as a child, and a white colleague. A grammar of another dialect,
presumably spoken around Casino, was written in the 1940s by a medical doctor
(Smythe 1978 [c 1942 or 19481); and grammars have been published from the late
1960s onwards in Yugambeh (Cunningham 1969), Gidhabal (Geytenbeek 1971),
WiyabalIWuyehbal of Lismore/Coraki (Holmer 1971), Wahlubal and Wehlubal
(Crowley 1978), and Manandjali or Yugambeh (Holmer 1983).
Attitudes towards 'sharing' the language with whites have varied from
community to community. One community, near Coraki, has generally been
antagonistic to whites - unless, understandably, they were trusted friends with
an understanding of the culture. Others, both as individuals and as groups, have
been keen for the language - and some cultural activities also - to be preserved,
and to be taught to any interested person, irrespective of race. Notable advocates
have included Joe Culham, Lyle Roberts the younger, and the Kombumerri
Aboriginal Corporation. In 1965 and 1966 I recorded data from Joe Culham. Lyle
Roberts the younger (a nephew of an older Lyle Roberts) lived in Lismore and died
some years ago: over many years he passed on information to the late Marjorie
Oakes, and he encouraged children to learn dances, with no restrictions on whether
they were of Aboriginal descent or not. The Kombumerri Aboriginal Corporation
of southern Brisbane and the Gold Coast (places traditionally within their dialect
area) obtained funding for courses in the language in 1988, 1989 and 1990, and
welcomed a number of non-Aboriginal participants. The reluctance of the Coraki
group to share knowledge with whites seems to have several causes: the Coraki
people may have assumed that academic writers have gained financially from their
published books (which is generally not the case, although there is little doubt
the writers have gained in academic status by their work); they have also felt whites
have taken so much from them, and it is a matter of pride and dignity to retain
something of their own, and to maintain sufficient separateness in language use
to allow privacy.
76 MARGARET SHABPE

It has also been proposed (Galley 1960, Crowley 1978) that the
Bundjalung were survivors of a long campaign to maintain their cultural
separateness from certain nearby Aboriginal groups, and were therefore better
equipped to continue their fight for autonomy when the white invasion came upon
them. Such cultural barriers seemed strongest towards groups to the south. On
the other hand, it is known that Bundjalung people were among the tribes or clans
that made trips to the Bunya Mountains in Queensland every few years when the
bunya pines bore heavily. In these seasons the owners of that territory invited
others to a great time of feasting, from which, early white records tell us, the people
of the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales returned looking sleek and well
nourished. Cultural barriers to the south and inland, however, were not
impenetrable: there is a Bundjalung song about travelling down the main road
through New England to the Moonbis; and another Bundjalung song, about the
Dunoon 'boxer' and playing two-up, was recorded down the south coast of New
South Wales, where it had presumably been transmitted or traded. It would help
in understanding the cultural ties and barriers if we could be certain of the route
Bundjalung people followed to the Bunya Mountains (that is, was it a coastal route,
or was it inland west of the Brisbane tribe?), and of the route this gambler's song
took in its transmission to the south coast. While (as Galley 1959 points out) we
cannot assume that cultural barriers and alliances were immutable over time, both
these songs were post-contact songs, possibly not dating back beyond this century,
and so alliances and barriers probably differed little from those we have recorded.

SOME FEATURES OF BUNDJALUNG

As has already been mentioned, Bundjalung is unusual in its survival in a relatively

densely settled area of Australia. Apart from that, there are some features of the
language itself which are not typical of Australian languages.
In pronunciation, Bundjalung is more similar to English in the way in
which stressed syllables are pronounced with considerable prominence and
unstressed syllables markedly reduced or 'slurred'. Most Australian Aboriginal
languages do not show this kind of stress-timed rhythm. Bundjalung is also unusual
- though not unique - in the way in which plosive consonants, such as b and
g , may be pronounced as fricative sounds, similar to English v and h. (More
precisely, Bundjalung here resembles Spanish, in which plosives like b and g may
be pronounced as fricatives [ p ] and ['y] in certain positions.)
In its grammar, Bundjalung is unusual among Pama-Nyungan languages
in its gender system. The language distinguishes four genders: masculine, feminine,
arboreal (for trees) and neuter (for anything else). In at least some of the dialects,
BUNDJALUNG 77

adjectives carried a suffix showing agreement with the gender of the noun. Note
in the following examples how the adjective gama(y) 'big' takes different suffixes
depending on the gender of the preceding noun:
baygal gamaygali
man big (masc)
'big man'
dubay gamaynyahgan
woman big (fern)
'big woman'
jali gamaynyahn
tree big (arbor)
'big tree'
balun gamagaY
river big (neuter)
'big river'
The masculine/feminine distinction can also be seen in the words for
'she' (nyahngan or nyulagan, depending on the dialect) and 'he' (nyula, nyule
or w ~ ~ u depending
li, on the dialect). Most Pama-Nyungan languages make no
distinction between pronouns 'he' and 'she'.
Bundjalung has the ergative case marking that is typical of Pama-
Nyungan languages (with a suffix to mark the agent of transitive verbs such as
'see', 'hit', 'bite', and so on). Less typically, Bundjalung also has an accusative suffix
on some nouns to mark the goal or object of a transitive verb. This accusative
marking seems to have applied to human nouns, nouns referring to larger animals
and birds, and to pronouns and demonstratives.

DIFFERENCES AMONG THE DIALECTS OF BUNDJALUNG

What are the differences among the dialects? It is reasonable to guess there were
some global differences in quality of voice and style of delivery, which may well
have interfered with intelligibility across dialects. Unfortunately, our recorded
materials are not comprehensive enough to define these differences; but there
were sufficient differences for some Kombumerri people to feel that a southern
speaker, Michael Walker, did not sound like the speakers they remembered,
although others could name relations he sounded like. Old written accounts indicate
that some people had little difficulty in understanding different dialects (like
McQuilty, who spoke the Lismore dialect fluently, see Rankin 1900), while others
found problems (Bray 1899).
There are more specific differences in pronunciation, for example in
the vowels in various words. Variation in the pronunciation of 'he' has already
78 MARGARET SHARPE

been mentioned: southern speakers seems to have said nyula, while northern
speakers said either nyuuli or n y u k . A similar difference is observable in the final
vowel of other words such as gala (or gali or gale) meaning 'this'.
A difference between western dialects (Gidhabal, Wahlubal, et cetera)
and northern and eastern dialects (Yugambeh, Wiyabal, et cetera) is that the former
sometimes have the vowel a where the latter have U . The word for 'no', for instance,
is yagam in the west and yugam elsewhere.
In general, vocabulary differed among the dialects, as is common in
Australia. The difference between minyang and nyang ('what?') has already been
mentioned as the basis of the names of the Minyangbal and Nyangbal dialects.
Crowley (1978) comments on quite substantial lexical differences between the
original northernmost and southernmost dialects.

WHY DO PEOPLE LEARN BUNDJALUNG?

Bundjalung is going out of everyday use. Why then have people shown an interest
in learning it?
In the first place, a sizeable number of Aboriginal people of Bundjalung
ancestry want to know more about this part of their inheritance. Some of them
remember the days when use of the language was strongly discouraged by white
disfavour and by the perceptions of their older relatives that it was to their
advantage to use English. Many people recently have come to the realisation that
it should not be a thing of shame to use their old language. A groundswell of desire
by many people worldwide to find their roots has also affected Aboriginal people
as well as non-Aboriginal people. Now those who remember only snatches of the
language want to revive it and learn more.
Secondly, many non-Aboriginal residents of the Northern Rivers area
and the Gold Coast and southern Brisbane had and have a genuine interest in the
language as one of the features of the area. There are many place names of
recognisable form and meaning in Bundjalung - some traditional, a few bestowed
in recent times. For such people also, there is far more scope to pursue this interest
than in places where less is known of the old languages.
A third source of interest is in Victoria, where Eve Fesl from Monash
University, whose ancestral affiliation is to Gabi Gabi, north of Bundjalung, wished
to teach an Aboriginal language in Victorian schools to Koori (Aboriginal)children.
She wanted to use a language that was known in some depth, which excluded
Victorian languages. In her search for a language which was spoken in as similar
an environment as possible to that of the Victorian languages, she ruled out well-
known and widely spoken desert languages such as Pitjantjatjara, and chose
BUNDJALUNG 79

Bundjalung as the most suitable. She also expressed the hope that this very choice
might inspire Bundjalung people to take a greater interest in the survival of their
language. Some years ago, from her initiative, a unit in Bundjalung was introduced
at Associate Diploma level at Churchill College (now Monash University College,
Gippsland).

ISSUES IN TEACHING A DISAPPEARING LANGUAGE

In teaching any language, decisions must be made about such matters as which
dialects to cover, what materials to use, and so on. Decisions of this kind may be
particularly difficult in the teaching of a language with no available large body
of speakers.
The diversity of Bundjalung dialects has presented some challenge to
teachers. When I taught a Bundjalung course in Lismore in 1977, we confined our
interest to the Lismore dialect, Wiyabal. We had as helper the late Lyle Roberts
Jnr, who spoke this dialect. In Armidale, when I taught some Bundjalung to
external students attending residential schools for the Associate Diploma in
Aboriginal Studies, the choice was less clear. The course was being offered outside
the Bundjalung area to an Aboriginal group who knew little or nothing of
traditional Aboriginal languages. But we had in the group two with Bundjalung
ancestry - from different dialect areas. We had good information on both of these
areas (TabulamEIaryulgil and Beaudesert) and we used common vocabulary as far
as possible.
In Queensland, after the first series of language afternoons in 1988,
when some teaching was done in a southern Bundjalung dialect and some in the
northern dialect of Yugambeh, the Kombumerri Aboriginal Corporation insisted
that only their dialect be taught in future courses. Even this decision was not simple
to implement. In fact, our information on this dialect is comparatively sketchy:
only some 500 words are well attested, and some holes in the grammar cannot
be filled. We decided to fill in the missing portions with material extrapolated from
better known dialects. It is reasonably certain, for example, that Yugambeh had
the same range of demonstratives as Gidhabal - where we had examples, they
fitted the same pattern; so, gaps were filled from other dialects.
In Victoria, for the unit taught at Monash University College, Gippsland,
the first choice was to continue to teach the dialect that had been taught at Lismore
in 1977. But it was also agreed that if a Bundjalung speaker came to help, the
teaching would have to adjust towards that speaker's dialect.
So far as the material to be taught is concerned, it must be remembered
that those who are learning Bundjalung today will not be blending into a
80 MARGARET SHARPE

community where the language is actively spoken, with the exception of a small
minority of people at Woodenbong. If there is any community, they must make
one themselves. A group like the Kombumerri Corporation is already a cohesive
group, with extensive family ties, and some words and phrases that have been
passed down. The choice as to how they will use the language is theirs. Will it
be used for greetings and leave-takings, for complaining about weather (rain, heat,
cold), for talking about traditional activities, for use in a bush setting, or for
shopping? Will it be used primarily orally, or will some want to concentrate on
written stories from earlier speakers? Will their learning be basically to sensitise
themselves to their ancestral roots, to another way of viewing the world, or to
the structures of traditional Aboriginal languages; or will they want to have an
in-group language to talk about private matters, or to mark their own group? There
is reasonable flexibility to do any of these things. Bundjalung has survived long
enough to incorporate words and expressions so that its users can talk about non-
traditional artefacts (for example, lights, cars, glasses, tea, butter, grog and money).
But to be realistic, it is unlikely that Bundjalung will take over functions which
English already performs well for them.
The question of what weight to give to spoken language or written
forms is also important. We all learn to listen and speak before we read or write,
of course, and in any language course I teach I insist on a spoken input. After
perhaps some initial mood-setting music, I often have a session I call 'language
wash', where I (or someone else) say a number of sentences. After that I get the
group to repeat many of these as best they can, concentrating on fluency and
intonation, even if some sounds are wrongly pronounced. Somewhere in the
process I attach translations to some of the phrases, and at some stage (but not
initially) I provide written transcripts. At the end of the session it is also advisable
to have another 'language wash', with students listening, not viewing their printed
sheets. Students can practise hearing the words and phrases in their heads, using
the written form to remind them, rather than thinking of only reading them.
The written mode is also important. Some worksheets can be designed
where words must be matched with pictures, again reinforcing the association
of objects and actions with Bundjalung words.
There are also a good number of Bundjalung texts in various dialects
which have been transcribed from spoken originals. These texts give an insight
into fluent discourse, in a way that is now impossible to do with live speakers.
The texts also illustrate differences from dialect to dialect, and they contain
samples of humour, cultural customs, accounts of recent happenings, and
traditional stories.
BUNDJALUNG 81

Ideally, of course, the role model in teaching should be a fluent native

speaker of the language and dialect being taught, but in the case of Bundjalung
this is becoming an increasingly difficult requirement to meet. In addition, so much
of what we have in recorded material in the language (on tape and cassette tape)
was recorded under poor conditions with background noise, flies buzzing near the
microphone at times, bird calls, and interruptions and asides, mostly in English.
I have, with some reluctance, used my own speech as role model, and
would expect that another teacher-learner of the language would do the same.
I also remind learners that they are a new Bundjalung group, and it will be up
to them to set their own norms and become their own role models. If they gain
reasonable fluency, even with 'defective' pronunciation, they will, after a little
tuning in on both sides, be able to understand and communicate with native
speakers. My aim in courses I teach is to build up fluency, even if the repertoire
is small. With that fluency, which also helps to internalise structural patterns of
the language, the learners have a chance of extending their knowledge more
efficiently than if they needed to construct what they said or wrote word by word
or with frequent checking of dictionary and grammar book.
Transcribed texts must also serve as role models, especially for more
advanced knowledge. A few of the post-contact songs which have been fully
transcribed provide a model, which helps to reinforce grammar and vocabulary.
A further question is how much colloquial detail to cover. Different
groups among the Bundjalung people have developed different greeting and leave-
taking phrases. Almost certainly many of these were not traditional, but have been
modelled on English greetings and leave-takings. Examples are: bugalbeh (literally
'good indeed') in Gidhabal; gingala wahlu ('how doing you') in Baryulgil. If we
can extrapolate from other ~boriginalcommunities where the language is
reasonably viable, we can assume that verbal greeting or acknowledgement of
an arrival or imminent departure was not always required. When there was a verbal
exchange, sentences such as 'you have come', 'where have you come from?', 'where
are you going', 'I'm going', 'off you go', were far more common.
Geytenbeek (1971) includes some colloquial and idiomatic expressions
which are also given in Sharpe e t a1 (1988, 17-19). I find it useful to show such
a list to students quite early in their learning. They should not be expected to
memorise them, but they illustrate the imaginative thinking of speakers of another
language. What description beats jalayn giyuhmbiyn (throat [is] sandstone) for
a sore throat? Or nyuladhahp (he-very) for self-important? Students should be
encouraged to pick out and use phrases that appeal to them or are pertinent for
describing situations and friends significant to them.
82 MARGARET SHARPE

One other matter that should be considered is the place of Aboriginal

English. One form of Aboriginal English is Baryulgil Square Talk (Fraser-Knowles
1985), which takes its name from the settlement known as The Square. It includes
words and phrases from Bundjalung (for example, gingala wuja,'how are you?';
that's nanyahz,'that's mine'), Aussie-English contractions of these (for example,
nyagz, from nyaguhn'money'), and strongly variant forms of English which are
sometimes modelled on Bundjalung constructions (for example, mal got me, 'I'm
hungry'; shordi-gandi got me, 'I'm puffed').

CONCLUSION
Many of the general issues discussed in this chapter apply to the learning of any
language. However, there are special problems - and sometimes opportunities -
in the teaching or learning of a language which is going out of use. There is, I feel,
much to be gained from studying a language such as Bundjalung, in what it reveals
about traditional Aboriginal language patterns, and about traditional lifestyles in
what was and still is a fertile and densely populated rural area of Australia, where
issues of land tenure and preservation of sacred mythological sites are very much
alive. The relatively extensive information we have on the language and culture
of this area make such study a worthwhile exercise, despite the lack of native
speakers as teachers.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Babies have language washing over them for perhaps over a year (including
time in the womb) before they start using any. What does this suggest about how
we should teach languages?
2. Spoken language is not primarily linked to marks on paper; it is linked with
gesture and body language, intonation and voice quality. If we don't have
information on these things in a disappearing or dead language, what choices
should we make?
3. If you were given the task of designing a course to sensitise people in your
district to Aboriginal languages, what choices would you make of language and
technique of teachinaearning, and why?
BUNDJALUNG 83

REFERENCES
Alien, J. and J. Lane
1913 Grammar, Vocabulary, and Notes of the Wangerriburra Tribe,
Queensland Parliamentary Papers 3, 1034-51. In Annual Report of
the Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Year 1913, Brisbane, 22-34.
On the Yugambeh dialect. John Alien was a native speaker; however,
he had not used the language actively for some 40-60 years when
this was written.
Bray, J.
1899 On Dialects and Place Names, Science 21 November.
An article quoting Bray and others, comments (mainly negative) on
Aborigines, and short word list.
Calley, M.J.C.
1960 Bandjalang Social Organisation, PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Crowley, T.
1978 The Middle Clarence Dialects of Bandjalang, Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
A detailed grammar of the Wahlubal/Wehlubal dialects of Tabulam
and Baryulgil. It includes as an appendix Smythe's grammar of
Bundjalung.
Cunningham, M.C.
1969 A Description of the Yugumbir Dialect of Bandjalang, University of
Queensland Arts Series 1, 8, 69-122.
A description of the Beaudesert dialect.
Curr, E.M.
1886-87 The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of
Landing in Australia, and the Routes by Which i t Spread Itself over
the Continent, 4 vols, J. Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne.
Fraser-Knowles, J.
1985 A New Bundjalung Language: Baryulgil Square Talk. In M.C. Sharpe
e t a1 1988, 174-201.
A description of the Bundjalung-laced English of the Baryulgil people.

Geytenbeek, B. and H. Geytenbeek

1971 Gidabal Grammar and Dictionary, Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies, Canberra.
A detailed grammar of the Gidhabal dialect of Bundjalung, spoken
around Woodenbong.
84 MARGARET SHARPE

Holmer, N.M.
1971 Notes on the Bandjalung Dialect: Spoken a t Coraki and Bungawalbin
Creek, New South Wales, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
Canberra.
Grammar, texts and vocabulary of WiyabalIWuyehbal, but note
Holmer does not consistently mark vowel length.
1983 Linguistic Survey of South-Eastern Queensland, Pacific Linguistics,
D-54, Canberra.
This covers material in neighbouring languages to Bundjalung, as well
as the Yugambeh dialect.
Rankin, T.
1900 Aboriginal Place Names and Other Words, with Their Meaning,
Peculiar to the Richmond and Tweed River Districts, Science 22
September 1900, 132-34.
Rankin was a district surveyor. Word list with pronunciation guide.
Sharpe, M.C. et a1
1985 An Introduction to the Bundjalung Language and Its Dialects
(revised), ACAE Publications, Armidale.
A relatively non-technical description of the language and its dialectal
variants. Includes a chapter on Baryulgil Square Talk, the distinctive
Bundjalung-laced English in domestic use among Baryulgil people.
Sharpe, M.C.
1991 A Bundjalung Language Course, prepared for Monash University
College, Gippsland.
Sharpe, M.C. (ed)
1992 Dictionary of Western Bundjalung, including Gidhabal and Tbbulam
Bzindjalung, Margaret Sharpe, University of New England, Armidale.
Smythe, W.E.
1978 [c 1942 or 19481 Bandjalang Grammar. In Terry Crowley 1978,
247-478.
 CHAPTER

6 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE:

SOCIALISATION IN A
WARLPIRI COMMUNITY

Edith Bavin

T his chapter discusses the context in which children acquire Warlpiri as a first
language. Children learn not only the forms and structures of the language,
but also what is appropriate in different situations. In discussing how children
acquire a language and how they learn about appropriate behaviour in society,
researchers often talk about language acquisition as one topic and socialisation
as another. This assumes that the two are separate, but other researchers do not
support this view. They argue that language is acquired through socialisation; the
two are integral aspects of child development. This paper demonstrates the
closeness of this linkage for one Aboriginal language, Warlpiri, but we can assume
that it has been widespread throughout Aboriginal Australia and continues today.

THE WARLPIRI LANGUAGE

Warlpiri is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the centre of Australia
by about 3,000 speakers. There are several places in which the language is the
community language, namely Yuendumu, Willowra and Lajamanu. In addition,
Warlpiri is spoken in other places including Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. The
discussion below is based on observations made in Yuendumu, which is 300
kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. There are about 800 Warlpiri people living
in the community. While the people have access to packaged food in the two shops,
they still like to hunt and gather bush food. The people live in extended families
and prefer to live and sleep outside even though some housing is available in the
community. Television reception and telephone contact have been available since
the end of 1987. Before that, radio telephone was used to make contact with other
communities.
The following sentence, consisting of three words, could be spoken in
six different orders. The only requirement is that the Zpa (an auxiliary, which signals
that the action is not complete) is attached to the first word in the sentence. The
actual order of words depends on the perspective of the speaker: instead of the
verb, the word for 'woman' could be first or the word for 'dog'. The 7 q k u on karnta
is the ergative suffix which shows that the woman is the person who is looking.
Nyangulpa maliki karntangku
was looking dog woman
'The woman was looking at the dog.'
86 EDITH BAVIN

While English uses word order primarily to determine who is doing

what to whom, Warlpiri uses case suffixes to show what function each noun has.
Some more examples of simple Warlpiri utterances are given below.
Note that, compared with English, Warlpiri can omit pronouns and nouns in many
circumstances. The suffix -pala, which is here attached to the verb, indicates that
the subject is dual; it is sufficient to indicate that two people or things are
performing the action, even when no pronoun or noun is included. If palangu
is used instead of pala, this signals that the two entities are now the objects or
goals of the action rather than the performers or agents. Note also that, like most
other Pama-Nyungan languages, Warlpiri follows the ergative pattern: the -rlu
attached to kurdujarra ('two children') is another form of the ergative suffix (an
alternative to the -ngku used in the previous example).
Nyangupala maliki
saw dog
They two saw the dog.'
Nyangupala kurdujarrarlu
saw two children
'The two children saw something/someone.'
Nyangupalangu
saw
'Someone/something saw them two.'
Nyangupalangu kurdujarra
saw two children
'Someone/something saw the two children.'
This small sample of Warlpiri should give an indication that Warlpiri
and English are quite different, not just in the words used, but also in structure.
There are, of course, many other grammatical structures that the Warlpiri child
must acquire. But it is not only in grammar that Warlpiri and English differ; there
are also differences in the way in which adults and children interact.

SOCIALISATION AND LEARNING

Not all cultures have the same expectations of children. For example,
in white middle-class society, preverbal children are generally considered to be
potential conversation partners and a care-giver carries on 'conversations' with
a child. When the child starts producing words, the care-giver often points to things
and asks the child to name the object or picture. Or the care-giver helps the child
to develop communicative skills by telling the child what to say to a third person.
However, in other cultures, children are not necessarily encouraged to speak until
SOCIALISATION IN A WARLPIRI COMMUNITY 87

they have some knowledge to give, and question-answer routines are not part of
the adult-child interaction.
Warlpiri adults give a great deal of love and attention to young babies
but they do not assume that children are attempting to communicate or talk when
they make their first sounds. A baby is carried around for a few months on a curved
wooden carrier (parraja)supported on the mother's hip. Older babies and infants
are carried around on an adult's hip or shoulders. A baby is fed at any time, and
woken up at any time, often by older children who take delight in pinching the
baby's cheeks, hoping to make the baby smile. A baby is passed around to any
willing holder.
Warlpiri adults do not generally modify situations to suit the child, or
generally structure the child's learning experience in stages, as is a common pattern
in Western societies. The child learns through direct observation and real-life
experience, the responsibility for learning being on the child. Similar patterns
prevail in other Aboriginal communities (Harris 1981). A Warlpiri adult assumes
that children learn by being with adults, watching what they do and listening to
what they say. When an adult does initiate talk with a young child, it is to name
others or to use an imperative to get the child to do something. The question-answer
routine found in some other societies is not part of the interaction between a
Warlpiri mother and her child. Such routines tend to be limited to societies with
books and pictures, and books are not found in Warlpiri camps.
Children are encouraged to be independent and are not protected from
potential danger in the way that many white middle-class children are. Warlpiri
adults will protect children from serious dangers such as snakes, but they do not
normally stop children from playing with a knife or piece of broken glass. When
a baby cries the mother provides milk, but when infants cry or scream for attention
they are likely to be left alone and not fussed over, unless a real reason for the
crying is determined.
The children learn language by exposure to it in real situations. They
learn the names of animals, trees and berries by being with the adults when they
hunt and gather. They learn names and kin terms by being told the names of people
in the immediate environment. Although the learning environment is not modified
and graded, there is some control over the knowledge the child is exposed to. For
example, a child would not be allowed to participate in all types of ceremony. There
is also some modification in the words used with young children, which will be
discussed a little later.
88 EDITH BAVIN

SKIN NAMES
To function as a member of the society, a Warlpiri person requires a name known
as a skin or section name. Systems of skin names are in operation in many Australian
Aboriginal groups. In the Warlpiri system there are eight skin groups, each of which
has a male and a female name. A child's name is determined by the names of the
father and mother, according to a fixed pattern of descent. For example, a
Japaljarri man should marry a Nakamarra woman and their children will be
Jungarrayi (if male) and Nungarrayi (if female). The sister of a Japaljarri man
will be Napaljarri: she should marry a Jakamarra man (possibly, but not
necessarily, her brother's wife's brother) and their children will be Jupurrula.
The full system can be summarised in a diagram (see Figure 1). The
horizontal lines in the centre link marriage partners, while the vertical lines at
the sides link fathers and sons. Male skin names (all beginning with J ) are listed
immediately above or below their female counterparts (all of which begin with
N). Note the regularity in the system: for example, a boy will have the same skin
name as his paternal grandfather.
Japaljarri ^ÑÑÑÑÑà Nakamarra
Napaljarri -> Jakamarra
7
lr Japangardi
Napangardi
<ÑÑÑÑÑÃ
<ÑÑÑÑÑÃ
Nampijinpa
Jampijinpa
7
l'Ñà Napanangka
L-> Japanangka
Jungarrayi
<£ÑÑÑÑÑ
Napurrula
Jupurrula
Nangala
Nungarrayi -> Jangala
Figure 1: The Warlpiri skin names.
All members of the community must have a skin name so that they
can fit into the social structure. Different land, stories and ritual are associated
with each group: people choose marriage partners on the basis of the skin names;
and people have obligations to others depending on their skin relationships.
Children must acquire knowledge about the system and must learn the names of
individuals, so that they know how to relate to them. For example, if a child's
mother is named Napal&xrri, any Napaljarri has a classificatory mother relation
to the child and can be called ngati 'mother' by the child.
When someone approaches a baby, the skin name for that person is
spoken, as is the baby's skin name. Thus, there is a type of introduction. Even
though the baby will not be able to process or remember the names, the behaviour
indicates the importance of knowing who other people are. The baby is socialised
right away to one important aspect of Warlpiri society.
SOCIALISATION IN A WARLPIRI COMMUNITY 89

The cultural significance of the skin name is reinforced in many ways

as the baby grows up. For example, children attend ceremonies with their mothers
and other female kin and see the designs on the dancers' bodies and the dances
that are associated with the different skin groups. When young people start
participating in ceremonies, they watch as the older people paint them; through
experience they become aware of their own skin group designs.
Of great importance is the relationship of Aboriginal people to their
land. When families go out from Yuendumu to gather food or to stay at outstations,
the adults point out who 'owns' the land which is being driven through, for
example, Jakamarra-Jupurrula land. This indicates the historical significance of
that land for Jakamarra and Jupurruto people and shows that they are responsible
for the land. The children are also told about significant sites on the land. For
example, the old people will point out rock holes, and perhaps sing a traditional
song that is related to the place. This is all part of the socialisation of the child;
the exposure to the skin names in relation to land ownership helps to reinforce
their importance, and the names themselves are learned through the socialisation
process.

BABY TALK

As noted earlier, Warlpiri children learn in real-life situations and not through
structured situations graded in difficulty, nor do they experience the question-
answer routines that are typical of adult-child interaction in many English-speaking
homes. Adults do, however, make some modifications in the language which they
use to babies. In this baby-talk style, the modifications include changing some of
the sounds in words and dropping some initial consonants. In addition, some baby
words, particularly animal and kin terms, are used, many of which are borrowings
from English. For example, mamiyi (from 'Mummy') is used for ngati 'mother',
a n d j i j i (from 'gee-gee') is used for nantuwu 'horse'. There is also a special baby
word for food. While adult Warlpiri divides food into three types, namely kuyu
'meat', m i y i 'vegetable food' and p a m 'honey and nectar', the form nyanya 'food'
is used with babies, an acknowledgement that children do not have the experience
to categorise food types under different labels.
This modified baby talk attempts to imitate the forms that the
youngsters first use when they start articulating words (Laughren 1984). Whereas
an adult would say nyampu for 'here' or 'this', a baby says ampu, leaving off the
initial consonant ny. In playing with young children or teasing them, adults and
older children might use ampu. This teasing puts responsibility on the child to
learn the adult form, and by the age of four the children have mastered most of
90 EDITH BAVIN

the phonology of the language, although some words continue to be said in the
baby form for many years, for example, pawu for pardu 'diminutive'.
Older siblings as well as adults use baby talk when playing with a
Warlpiri baby. Warlpiri children of four tease their baby siblings, indicating that
they are socialised by that age to use different language forms in different contexts.
The following example is taken from an interaction between a four-year-old child
(4;ll) and her two-year-old sister (2;8). The younger sister does pronounce initial
consonants but her sister uses baby talk back to her, leaving off the initial consonant
from nganayi, nyampzi and ja& she also substitutes W for ng in ngula. The teasing
style is also marked by a relatively high pitched voice.
J: (=2;8) ngula nganayijayi
that one do what's it
That one is doing something:
wula anayi-ayi ampu
that one do what's it here
'That one's doing something here.'
From the age of three-and-a-half, children are able to take turns in
conversation, and they talk more often about events in the past. That is, children
talk about events that their conversation partner may not have experienced: they
contribute information. Thus, in addition to having acquired many of the
grammatical structures in the language, Warlpiri children have acquired basic
conversational skills by the middle of their fourth year. This is the age when they
show some independence by wandering away from the immediate camp
environment with other children. They go off looking for food or entertainment
usually with another child of a similar age, or with older children who look out
for them. They find sticks and dig into holes, as do their mothers when hunting
for wardapi 'goanna', they reach for yakajirri berries on low shrubs, and they
throw stones at birds in the trees. These provide experiences which they can recall
on later occasions.
Once they have developed basic conversational skills, the children start
manipulating the language as in the teasing routines mentioned above. In other
cultures also, children tease and role-play by imitating features of the language
of others, and they do this from an early age (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986).

KIN TERMINOLOGY

The kinship systems of Warlpiri and English are quite different. In English we have
a single term 'grandmother' whereas Warlpiri distinguishes between yaparia
(father's mother) and 7070 (mother's mother). But there is a further difference
SOCIALISATION IN A WAflLPIRI COMMIJNITY 91

here: yaparia refers not only to father's mother but also to her brothers and sisters;
likewisejam also refers to mother's mother's brothers and sisters. Where English
has the word 'aunt', Warlpiri has pimirdi (father's sister); mother's sister is treated
as mother and referred to as ngati (mother).
Although Warlpiri adults do not generally grade learning situations,
they do simplify kin terms when they speak directly to young children between
the ages of two and three. Adults neutralise the basic opposition between male
and female by using papa to refer to father, father's brother and father's sister,
and mamiyi to refer to mother, mother's sister and mother's brother (Laughren
1984). Later, when the child is about three or four, sex is distinguished; papa is
distinguished from pimiyi (=pimirdi) 'father's sister', and mamiyi is distinguished
from aminyi (=ngamirni)'mother's brother'. The age difference between siblings
is also neutralised, so that kakiyi 'brother' replaces both papardi 'older brother'
and kukurnu 'younger brother', while yayi 'sister' replaces both kapirdi 'older
sister' and ngawurru 'younger sister'. This simplification is in addition to phonetic
modifications which give forms such as wayingiyi for warringiyi (father's father),
and yaparii is used often instead of yaparia (father's mother).
So, there is some acknowledgement that a child needs to be introduced
to forms gradually. The basic opposition between father's kin and mother's kin
is deemed more important for the child than sex distinctions within that opposition.
Since adults reduce the number of oppositions in the kin system when
talking directly to young children, we might assume that this modification assists
the child in learning the terms and the system. Understanding of the kin system
and the terms used to label relations nevertheless takes many years to master.
At first, children use kin terms as names for individuals; for example,jaja 'mother's
mother' is a particular individual. The realisation that any person with a particular
skin name has a particular classificatory kin relationship does not come
immediately, just as English-speaking children may take some time to grasp that
even adults have aunts and uncles. The focus of the Warlpiri modifications is to
provide the child with a basic distinction between father's and mother's kin, a
distinction that is crucial in the social organisation of the community. The concern
is more with socialising the child to this distinction than with teaching the child
the language for naming.
The kin terminology is large and the full range of terms is not acquired
until adulthood. Before the age of five, the children can use appropriate terms
to distinguish between own and other generations, but they can make few
generalisations. They can identify particular individuals but the system is not
understood. They often make the mistake of taking a parent's perspective, assuming
that because a parent can identify a particular skin group as ngati 'mother', for
92 EDITH BAVIN

example, that skin group is appropriate as their own ngati. Between the ages of
six and eleven knowledge of the connections between skin names and particular
kin relations increases. Those for at least one grandparent and mother are known
first, while those for children and spouse are acquired later. This suggests that
the child learns the system gradually, based on what is relevant in the child's
experience. Other evidence supporting this view is that children without an actual
example of a particular relation (for example, pimirdi 'father's sister') tend not
to know which skin group fills this relationship as early as children who do have
such a relation.
The kin domain is an interesting area to observe the acquisition of a
language when the group is in contact with another language. For most children,
the general terms kakiyi 'brother' and yayi 'sister' are used, although some
children between six and ten can make the distinction between older and younger
siblings, using the appropriate terms. This may reflect some change going on in
the language, with the age distinction being lost. In Warlpiri, actual siblings as
well as the children of father's brother and mother's sister are classified as a
person's brothers and sisters. While the Warlpiri children often use English words
to label kin, some of them maintain the Warlpiri system by using 'sister' and
'brother' for relations that would be classified as cousins in English.

EARLY UTTERANCES
By the age of two, Warlpiri children produce connected utterances that contain
recognisable forms. A few words are said in isolation before that age, baby-talk
words such asjiji 'horse' and nyanya 'food'. The adult shows pronounced pride
with the knowledge gained by the child, and teases the child, repeating the words
as they are pronounced. When the child produces longer utterances, utterances
using suffixes on nouns and verbs, Warlpiri adults do not attempt to interpret what
is not easily recognisable. In fact, adults may be quite dismissive: one Warlpiri
speaker is quoted as saying:
Witawita kujakalu jaajaawangka, kulalpalu Warlpiriji wangkayarla
'Little ones who talk like crows, they are not speaking Warlpiri.'
The following is from a two-year-old.The forms are recognisable despite
the modified pronunciation of naka for nyanka 'look', nanuwu for nantuwu
'horse' and amku for ngajuku 'for me'. But even though the forms can be
identified, the child's communicative intentions are not easy to determine. The
listener needs to guess, and this adults do not choose to do.
SOCIALISATION IN A WARLPIRI COMMUNITY 93

mamiyi, kuku naka warna

mummy evil spirit look snake
mamiyi nanuwu
mummy horse
mamiyi punku-lu aju-ku
mummy bad-they me-DAT

When children are recognised as talking, they are assumed to have

knowledge and will be answered by the adult. Their maturity is measured in
knowledge gained rather than in years of age. When adults talk to children who
they do recognise as speaking Warlpiri, talk is not modified to help the child in
the task of acquiring the language structures. The language produced is fast and
repetitive, as in discourse style among adults themselves. Imperatives are frequent:
the child is told to do things such as take, give, come, or leave something. The
adult expects appropriate behavioural responses, but is not upset if the child does
not respond as expected. It is assumed that children will eventually take
responsibility for their own actions.
There is considerable phonetic variation in the speech of the young
Warlpiri child. A word may have the correct initial consonant in one utterance
but not in the next. Of particular interest is the play on sounds, even in the speech
of two-year-olds. Consider the following example from a two-year-old child. Long
strings like this are often sung by children. (Below the forms uttered by the child
are possible corresponding adult words.)

ala tutu tutu lala tu atu

Nangala jarntu jarntu Nangala jarntu ngaju
Nangala dog dog Nangala dog me
ati PUPU ampu ampuku ata ataku
9 9 nyampu nyampuku ngaju ngajuku
9 9 herelthis for this me for me

Another example of word play is with wita 'small' which may be

pronounced in several ways in one utterance: wita, tita, pita and wuta. One two-
year-old produced the following. The suffixes on wita may correspond to the adult
diminutive suffix -pardu.
witapu tita tu
witapardu wita-pardu
tiny tiny
An awareness of different speech styles and sounds also seems to be
apparent in the use of the fricative [S]with pretend baby talk. Warlpiri does not
94 EDZTH BAVIN

have fricatives. Yet a four-year-old uttered a series of six nonsense words, all with
initial [S].An adult Warlpiri claimed that she was imitating English and that is
the way children imitate English speakers; they are aware of the [S]sound as a
marker of the language of the non-Aboriginal people in the community.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

The Warlpiri lifestyle is not as it was before white settlement. It has changed as
other cultures have changed. The community at Yuendumu has a school in which
children are taught in classroom settings. This means that there are discontinuities
between traditional learning and school teaching situations. The children learn
literacy skills, something their grandparents did not do. Food is available in the
shops, and the acquisition of skills necessary for food gathering is not as crucial
a s it once was. The children are now able to watch television and see other lifestyles
as depicted through the programs.
In spite of these changes, the community still maintains traditional
values. Warlpiri children learn about social relations through naming, and they
acquire skills for gathering and preparing bush food as well as other skills and
the language that they involve by observing and imitating their elders. I have seen
children of two using twigs to make the digging motions they have observed from
adults, motions they will need to dig for food when they are older. Knowledge
increases through adulthood with experience, and continues to develop. I have
seen a woman of sixteen catching, gutting and cooking a lizard with great
confidence, a woman of thirty painting ritual body designs for the first time,
checking her knowledge with older women sitting close by; and another woman
in her late thirties checking with an older woman about interpreting tracks in
the sand. Knowledge is acquired over many years.
Like children from other language groups, Warlpiri children first talk
about the here and now, and the hearer must rely on the immediate context for
interpretation. 'falk about the remote develops as the child masters the necessary
grammatical forms in the language and the experiences to draw upon. Like other
children, the Warlpiri first use simple clause utterances before linking clauses
together to establish sequential and causal relations. Narrative skills take longer
to acquire.
Although there have been changes in the lifestyle of the Warlpiri
people, a strong sense of appropriate behaviour persists and is evident in the
interactions between adults and children. Through these interactions children are
socialised into the culture, and in their socialisation children acquire language and
its appropriate use.
SOCIALISATION IN A WART.PIRI COMMUNITY 95

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Observe for about twenty minutes a mother (or other care-giver) with a baby
of about one year of age. Note the language forms the mother uses, and what
function these have. For example:
Does she try to direct the child's attentions to objects or people?
If so, does she do this by pointing or by verbal expressions or
both?
Does she ask questions of the baby?
Does she offer explanations to the baby?
Does she interpret the baby's cries as attempts to communicate?
That is, does she articulate what she thinks the baby is trying to say? If so, is
she confident that her first guess correctly identifies the baby's intentions
or does she try to work out some other interpretation?
2. Observe an older sibling with a baby (under one year old). What voice
modifications, if any, does the sibling make when directly addressing the baby?
Can you detect any systematic differences between the sibling's talk to the baby
and the mother's in terms of (a)what they talk about, (b) how they interpret what
the baby is communicating, and (c) modifications in voice or words used?
3. Listen to some speech from a two-year-old child. Write down what the child
is trying to communicate. How easy is it to interpret the words used? Discuss any
difficulties. Does the child use gesture to accompany speech?
4. Calculate what percentage of the day a particular baby spends alone, how much
time adults talk directly to the child, and how much time the child is exposed
to speech that is not directly addressed to the child. Compare your findings with
others in your group.
5 . Discuss what you perceive are the major differences between the early
experience for a Warlpiri child and the early experience of a baby such as the one
you observed for question (1).
6. Use Figure 1 to work out the skin names of relations: choose a name for
yourself, then work out the skin name of your relatives, including mother, father,
(potential) mother-in-law, father's father, and so on.
96 EDITH BAVIN

REFERENCES
Harris, S.
1981 Culture and Learning: Tradition and Education in North East
Arnhem Land, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
Laughren, M.
1984 Warlpiri Baby Talk, Australian Journal of Linguistics 4(1), 73-88.
Schieffelin, B.B. and E. Ochs (eds)
1986 Language Socialization across Cultures, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
 CHAPTER

7 OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARY
WAYS OF USING
A LANGUAGE

Barry Alpher

REGISTERS

A ustralian Aborigines often speak fluently more than one Aboriginal language,
more than one regional variety of the same Aboriginal language, and one
or more varieties of English. If they live in a traditional community, they are also
likely to have available different varieties of their own regional dialect, which
they use for different purposes and with persons of different social categories.
These speech varieties include forms of the language used with or about relatives
with whom people maintain relations of respect or avoidance (for example,
mothers-in-law and certain kinds of cousins); forms used with relatives with whom
people maintain relations of jesting familiarity; forms used with very young
children ('baby talk'); forms learned by young men in the course of their initiation
and used only in that context; and sign language, in which gestures made with
the hands are used instead of spoken words.
The use of the same language in different varieties for different social
purposes is perfectly familiar to speakers of English. Consider the difference
between saying 'Harry needs a car' and 'Mr Fanshaw requires an automobile'. A
car is the same thing as an automobile, needing is the same thing as requiring,
and - let us say - 'Harry' and 'Mr Fanshaw' refer to the same person. The
difference is one of appropriateness in certain situations and with certain people.
A term often used for speech varieties of this sort is 'register'. Registers in English
tend to be characterised by differences in vocabulary, as in the examplesjust given,
and by differences in grammar and sometimes in pronunciation as well.

RESPECT REGISTERS
The term 'register' seems an appropriate one for spoken varieties of Aboriginal
languages of the types mentioned above. The special 'respect' speech variety used
by a man (in some parts of Australia) in talking about his mother-in-law, for
example, is used only in certain situations and with persons of certain categories,
and it differs from 'ordinary' speech largely in the use of different vocabulary
items. So, for example, in the Uw-Oykangand language of southwestern Cape York
Peninsula the ordinary term for 'foot' is ebmal, but a man speaking to a person
who stands in the kinship relation of potential mother-in-law to him will refer
98 BARRY ALPHER

to the foot as arrmbun. The respect register, the form of speech that makes use
of the term arrmbun for 'foot', is known in Uw-Oykangand as Olkel-Ilmbanhthi.
In explaining how whole sentences are put together in a respect register
like Olkel-Ilmbanhthi, it is useful to distinguish between 'content words' and
'function words'. This distinction can be made for any language. Content words
in English include all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives while function words are
conjunctions ('and', 'or', 'but', 'if', 'when', et cetera), prepositions ('to', 'by', 'on',
et cetera) and pronouns ('you1, 'she', 'it', 'they', et cetera). Function words tend
to signal relationships among words and clauses and they are very limited in
number though frequent in occurrence. In certain (but by no means all) Aboriginal
languages, all of the content words in a proper respect register sentence belong
to the respect vocabulary rather than the ordinary vocabulary. Uw-Oykangand
is one such language. An example is the two ways to say 'I have a sore foot':
ORDINARY Ebmal ijam ilg ay.
RESPECT Arrmbun obmben ilg ay.
English foot sore with I
Here the respect-vocabulary word arrmbun 'foot' corresponds to the ordinary
content word ebmal, a noun, and the respect-vocabulary word obmben 'sore'
corresponds to the content word ijam, an adjective (in Uw-Oykangand a kind of
noun). But the function words ilg 'with' and a y 'I' remain the same in both ways
of speaking.
In a language like Uw-Oykangand (or English), the list of 'function'
elements includes not only whole words, but also parts of words. Examples of such
parts in Uw-Oykangand are the endings that signal the tense of verbs and those
that signal the case of nouns. These are expressed with the same forms in respect-
register speech as in ordinary speech, as the following examples, which mean 'I
speared it with a spear', illustrate:

ORDINARY Alka-nhdh idu-rr ay.

RESPECT Udnga-nhdh yanganunyja-rr ay.
English spear-INSTRUM spear-PAST I

Here the content words for 'spear' (the nouns alka- and udnga-) and 'to spear'
(the verbs idu- and yanganuny3a-) differ from one register to the other, but the
instrumental case-ending -nhdh ('with' a spear) and the past tense-ending -rr,like
the function word a y 'I', remain constant.
Not all Aboriginal respect languages are as thorough as Olkel-
Ilmbanhthi in replacing content words. For example, in the Yir-Yoront language
- spoken by Uw-Oykangand's neighbour to the northwest - inclusion of the
function word wangal in a sentence, preceding the verb, characterises the sentence
OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARY WAYS OF USING A LANGUAGE 99

as respectful (wangal also occurs as a content word meaning 'hand' in the respect
register). The Yir-Yoront respect register also makes use of special content words,
but in nowhere near as consistent or thoroughgoing a way as Uw-Oykangand.
Respect-register vocabulary is in a sense an 'add-on' to the ordinary
vocabulary of a language. It is created in a number of ways; some of these are
more favoured in some regions than in others. There are, to start with, certain
words which occur in the respect vocabularies of a number of not-very-closely
related languages in a single region. For example, the Yir-Yoront respect word for
'tree, stick', yulh, is cognate with the respect word for 'tree, stick' in a number
of languages spoken to the north. Then there are respect words derived from
ordinary words on the basis of some trope: the ordinary Yir-Yoront word thorrchn
means 'hair1,and its derivative thorrchonh means 'dog' or '(hairy) yam'. Respect
words can, for example, be derived from ordinary words: the Yir-Yoront respect
word for 'go', larr-mu, is compounded of the ordinary words for 'ground', larr,
and 'tread on', ma. And, in a number of regions, there is a practice of using certain
ordinary words from a neighbouring dialect or language as respect words in one's
own.
Although the function words in Aboriginal respect registers are
normally the same as those in the ordinary register, they are in certain cases used
differently. One typical case is the pronouns for 'you'. In ordinary Uw-Oykangand,
'you' (one person) is inang, 'you two' is ubal, and 'you' (more than two persons)
is u,w. But in Olkel-Ilmbanhthi, any person or persons addressed, even if only one,
are addressed with the plural pronoun urr. The use of the plural in respectful
speech is a feature of many languages right across the world, with no historical
connection to each other. Those readers who have studied French will recognise
it in the different usage of the pronouns tu (singular) and vous (plural), both
meaning 'you1, but the latter used where respect or deference is intended.
Another common feature of respectful speech is a certain amount of
intentional vagueness. It is as if the message of the utterance becomes to an extent
less important than the nature of the social relationship that the speaker is trying
to maintain or establish with the person spoken to. In the respect registers of
Aboriginal languages such vagueness is implicit in the use of a single respect-
register word to substitute for any of a number of ordinary-register words that
are related to each other in one way or another. Most usually, this relation is one
of membership in the same class based on similarity of meaning. It is as if, in
English, there were a respect register in which the word 'vehicle' was always used
whenever one wanted to refer to a car, a bus, or a truck. An Aboriginal respect
register may, for example, refer to any of the different kinds of shark and stingray,
each with its own name in the ordinary register, by a single term. It is still possible
100 BARRY ALPHER

to be precise in a respect register. One can, if necessary, always use the respect
word for 'shark-or-ray' and qualify it as, say, 'the one with spots and a long tail'.
It is rather that the normal purpose of respect register is not so much to make
precise commentary as to negotiate difficult relationships.
Classifying things according to their family-like relations, or taxonomic
class inclusion, is by no means the only principle on which Aboriginal respect
registers use a single term as a substitute for more than one ordinary term. Olkel-
Ilmbanhthi, for example, uses eingamb instead of ordinary Uw-Oykangand ew
'mouth' and ow 'nose' (perhaps because of their proximity on the face, but possibly
also because of the phonetic similarity of the words), and unhunh for the ordinary
words ef 'tongue' and ukan 'grass' (presumably having in mind the similarity in
shape).

RESPECT VOCABULARY AND CLASSIFICATION

Where a respect register, like Olkel-Ilmbanhthi, has the feature that all content
words must have a special equivalent word in the respect vocabulary, it is typically
taxonomic class inclusion that is the major principle on which many ordinary-
register words are equated with a single word in the respect register. Here the
respect register becomes a handy means for investigating the taxonomic classes
that a language recognises. People are sometimes rather vague about these things:
is a bicycle a kind of vehicle? What about a train? An aeroplane? But in the relation
between an ordinary vocabulary and a respect vocabulary with a replacement
term for every content word, such questions have been answered, in a sense, in
advance. The most extensively described language of this type is Dyirbal, spoken
in the rainforest region of southeast Cape York Peninsula. Its respect register is
known as Dyalnguy and its ordinary register as Guwal.
In studying the correspondence between Guwal and Dyalnguy, Dixon
(1971) asked speakers of Dyirbal to do two things: first, for every ordinary (Guwal)
word, he asked a speaker what its respect vocabulary (Dyalnguy) equivalent was.
Usually, each Guwal word corresponded to just one Dyalnguy word, but often each
Dyalnguy word corresponded to several Guwal words. Second, for each Dyalnguy
word, he asked what its Guwal equivalent was. With great consistency, Dyirbal
speakers cited not all of the corresponding Guwal words, but just one of them.
For example, for each of the Guwal words buwanyu 'tell',jinkanyu 'tell a particular
piece of news', gindimban 'warn', and ngarran 'tell someone one does not have
a certain thing, for example food, when one has', the Dyalnguy equivalent is
wuyuban. When asked what the ordinary word was for wuyuban, Dyirbal speakers
answered that it was buwanyu, that is, 'to tell', purely and simply. So, not only
OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARY WAYS OF USING A LANGUAGE

do the correspondences of Guwal to Dyalnguy vocabulary amount to an objective

form of evidence for speakers' feelings about the similarities in meaning between
words, but they suggest that some of these meanings are more fundamental than
others. In Dixon's terminology, verbs like buwanyu 'tell' are nuclear verbs, and
the other 'tell' verbs, jinkanyu, gindimban, and ngarran, are non-nuclear verbs.
On these taxonomic groups and on the nuclearlnon-nuclear distinction, an
extensive analysis of the meanings of Dyirbal words can be built.

THE NATURE OF RESPECT

The study of respect registers helps in the understanding of many other areas of
Aboriginal life besides the meanings of words; one such area is that of the nature
of respect itself, and of the particular social relations of which respect is a feature.
Most Aboriginal languages have a respect register, but the particular relatives with
whom, or about whom, one uses the respect register differ from one group to the
next. In some groups, the relative is only the mother-in-law, or any person who
is related in such a way as to be appropriate as a mother-in-law. In most Aboriginal
groups, a woman and a man related as mother-in-law and son-in-law take great
care never to be anywhere near each other; often the man will use respect register
when he talks about his mother-in-law. In some communities a man is allowed
to be in the presence of a potential mother-in-law (a woman to whose daughter
he is neither married nor betrothed), but if he addresses her he will use respect
register, and more usually he will speak to her using a third person as an
intermediary. Sometimes this third person will just stand there and maintain the
fiction of being an intermediary; sometimes the conversation is carried on through
an imaginary third person. In various communities of Cape York, including the
Yir-Yoront and the Wik-Ngathana community not far to the north, the list of
relatives with whom one uses respect register is a longer one: a man speaking
to (or sometimes about) his daughter, a man speaking with his wife's brother or
with his mother's brother or with certain of his grandparents. The list and the
details of how and when the respect register is used vary from one community
to the next.
People can manipulate relationships by failing to use respect register
where it is appropriate, or using it where it is not. Storytellers can create irony
when they have a character use respect register but fail to follow through with
other appropriate actions: so it is that a personage in a Yir-Yoront story who is
notorious for his outrageous behaviour correctly addresses his mother-in-law's
father (a kind of grandfather) in respect register, informing his grandfather that
he is keeping for himself the wallaby that the grandfather has killed. According
102 BARRY ALPHER

to proper etiquette, he should be giving food to his grandfather rather than taking
it from him.

INITIATION REGISTERS

The detailed study of the use of respect registers can reveal endless subtleties in
social behaviour. But the Aboriginal repertoire of speech varieties is by no means
limited to these. Another sort of register in Aboriginal languages that has received
a great deal of attention from scholars is that which older men teach to younger
men as part of their advanced initiation. Of these registers it can in general be
said that they are brilliant creations in which a very small stock of special words
is made to do all the work of framing any proposition that a speaker wants to
express. Because details of initiation practices are sacred and are kept as secrets
among initiated men, it is not in general ethical to discuss them in scholarly
publications.
But in one case, that of the initiation register (known as Demin or
Damin) of the Lardil people of Mornington Island in Queensland, the initiated men
themselves have released details to the general public. They have done this because,
on the one hand, they are no longer performing initiations - having been prevented
from doing so in the past by the mission authorities in charge of their settlement
- and, on the other hand, they feel that they have in Demin a creation worthy
of the world's admiration. Demin uses some 150 basic elements to substitute for
all the words of regular Lardil. Demin words differ from those of ordinary Lardil
in one very conspicuous way: the sound-system according to which they are
pronounced is radically unlike that of ordinary Lardil or of any other Australian
Aboriginal language. This system includes in its inventory of sounds several
nasalised clicks and an ingressive lateral (an [l] sound made by drawing the breath
into the lungs). Without going into the details of how all these sounds are produced,
it should nonetheless be clear to readers that words in Demin have and are intended
to have a bizarre sound. Speakers find them both funny and fun to make.
The extremely small number of basic elements in Demin forces speakers
to make very judicious use of them in allocating them to the various concepts
expressed by single words in ordinary Lardil. It also forces speakers to draw
extensively on their knowledge of complex sentence constructions in Lardil, in
order to express distinctions a t a level of fineness not possible by naming a thing
with a single basic element. It seems also that there is in Demin no use of
overgeneral reference to things to produce a deferential mode of speech. Rather,
what seems to be asked of the young initiands is that they demonstrate verbal
proficiency, just as they are asked to demonstrate proficiency in other aspects of
OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARYWAYS OF USING A LANGUAGE 103

adult life. In Lardil tradition, the invention of Demin is ascribed to a single person,
Kalthad (or Yellow Trevally, as he would be known in English). Here, there is no
mistaking the linkage of Demin with exceptional personal competence.

SIGN LANGUAGE
A phenomenon of a rather different kind from the spoken registers
is sign language. Not a register, it is a different medium of communication - in
somewhat the same sense as written language is. In sign language, the 'words'
are hand motions. For example, the sign in the Warlpiri language (north-central
Northern Territory) for 'old man' is the hand with fingers spread apart but slightly
flexed, held with palm towards the face and moved a short distance forwards and
back; the corresponding spoken word is purlka. Sign language is used by various
persons in various situations, although some of the situations in which it might
be thought to be most useful, such as between men who must be quiet while they
are stalking game, are not in fact the occasions when it is most highly developed.
The most highly elaborated sign language is used by mature women in Aboriginal
communities where a woman, upon the death of her husband, must avoid speaking
during an extended period of mourning. In these communities, most of which are
located in the north-central desert region of the Northern Territory, mature women
become proficient enough in sign language to express anything that can be
expressed in the spoken language.
Any number of features of sign language are worthy of extensive
discussion; here it will have to suffice to mention just three. The first is that a
highly developed sign language like that of the Warlpiri is modelled closely on the
spoken language, with signs corresponding to all the content words and also to
some of the function words and affixes. There is little one-to-many correspondence
of sign language words to spoken words; sign language is specific.
The second feature is that sign language omits signs for elements of
the spoken language that indicate the grammatical relation of the parts of a
sentence (who did what to whom) and the relative time at which the action is
said to have occurred (the tense of the verbs). So, for example, the spoken Warlpiri
sentence that means 'two men are carrying firewood' is:
Wati-jarra-rlu ka-pala warlu ka-nyi
two men they two wood carry
where the ergative suffix -rlu signals that the men are the agents of the action,
the auxiliary element kapala signals that the time is the present and that the
subject of the sentence is dual, and the suffix -nyi signals that the time of the
action is not in the past. The same sentence rendered in sign language contains
104 BARRY ALPHER

the signs for 'men', 'two', '(fire)wood', and 'carry', in that order, and omits the
rest.
The third feature is that sign language 'words', when they are extended
to cover the meanings of more than one spoken word, sometimes do so, not on
the basis of shared features of meaning, but on the basis of shared features of
sound. So, for example, the Warlpiri sign corresponding to the spoken word winpiri
'spearwood' (a species of tree) is used also for the spoken words wina 'winner',
wiki 'week', wiki 'whisky', Winjiyi 'Wednesday', and Winiyi 'Winnie'. The basis
for the association is the shared syllable wi. It is of interest here that the first
languages ever to be written, Sumerian and Egyptian, some 5,000years ago, used
signs which were pictures of what they represented but which also represented
words that sounded similar. In so doing the writers of these languages made the
first steps towards a representation of the sounds of language rather than of the
meaningful units as wholes. Aboriginal sign language is a linguistic medium, and
it appears to be evolving along similar lines to that other non-spoken medium,
writing.

CONCLUSION
This discussion of non-ordinary forms of Aboriginal languages has, of course, barely
scratched the surface. Much more can be said about each of the language varieties
considered above, and numerous other varieties have not been mentioned at all.
What is worth mentioning in closing is that all of these forms of communication
represent not just intricate patterns of communication and social interaction, but
intellectual achievements that involve conscious creative acts by their users.

FURTHER READING
Much of the information in this chapter comes from the readings mentioned below.
Those who are interested in further study of this subject might wish to begin by
consulting them.
The notion of 'register' is explained in Halliday and Hasan (1976).
Interesting explorations of the subtleties of respect registers are contained in the
articles by McConvell, Merlan, Rumsey and Sutton in Heath, Merlan, and Rumsey
(1982). In the same collection is an introduction by Kenneth Hale to the initiation
register of Lardil. The Dyirbal respect register is discussed in Dixon (1971). A
discussion of the Yir-Yoront respect vocabulary and of the various origins of the
words in it can be found in Alpher (1991). An excellent and thorough discussion
of Aboriginal sign language is Kendon (1988).
OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARYWAYS OF USING A LANGUAGE 105

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Consider some examples of what would count as respectful or disrespectful
utterances in English. Try to relate such examples to real situations and avoid
artificially elaborate utterances that are unlikely to be genuinely used (such as
'I wonder whether you would graciously consent to lending me a dollar'). You might
consider such situations as writing a letter to apply for a job or introducing yourself
to a new neighbour or to a new colleague a t work, or speaking to someone who
has just been to a funeral.
2. Why do you think many languages use a plural 'you' to show respect? What
other ways are there of avoiding a direct 'you'? In Parliament, for example, it is
conventional to speak of 'the member for Southtown' rather than to address the
person directly: can you add other examples of this kind?
3. How would you set about designing a sign language? How would you represent
words like 'true' and 'honest'? How, if at all, could you distinguish between 'fall'
and 'fell' or between 'tomorrow' and 'today'?

REFERENCES
Alpher, B.
1991 Yir-Yoront Lexicon: Sketch and Dictionary of a n Australian
Language, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.
Dixon, R.M.W.
1971 A Method of Semantic Description. In D.D. Steinberg and L.A.
Jakobovits (eds), Semantics: A n Interdisciplinary Reader in
Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Hale, K.
1982 The Logic of Damin Kinship "[terminology.In J. Heath, F. Merian, and
A. Rumsey (eds), Languages of Kinship in Aboriginal Australia,
Oceania Linguistic Monographs 24, University of Sydney, Sydney,
31-37.
Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan
1976 Cohesion in English, Longman, London
Haviland, J.B.
1979a Guugu-Yimidhirr Brother-in-Law Language, Language in Society
8,365-93.
1979b How to "falk to Your Brother-in-Law in Guugu-Yimidhirr.In T. Shopen
(ed), Languages and Their Speakers, Winthrop, Cambridge MA,
160-239.
106 BASRY ALPHER

Kendon, A.
1988 Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic a n d
Communicative Perspectives, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
McConvell, P.
1982 Neutralisation and Degrees of Respect in Gurindji. In J. Heath, F.
Merlan, and A. Rumsey (eds), Languages of Kinship i n Aboriginal
Australia, Oceania Linguistic Monographs 24, University of Sydney,
Sydney, 86-106.
Merlan, F.
1982 'Egocentric' and 'Altercentric' Usage of Kin Terms in Mangarayi. In
J. Heath, F. Merlan, and A. Rumsey (eds), Languages of Kinship i n
Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Linguistic Monographs 24, University
of Sydney, Sydney, 107-24.
Rumsey, A.
1982 Gun-Gunma: An Aboriginal Avoidance Language and Its Social
Functions. In J. Heath, F. Merlan, and A. Rumsey (eds), Languages
of Kinship in Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Linguistic Monographs
24, University of Sydney, Sydney, 160-81.
Sutton, P.
1982 Personal Power, Kin Classification and Speech Etiquette in Aboriginal
Australia. In J. Heath, F. Merlan, and A. Rumsey (eds), Languages
of Kinship i n Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Linguistic Monographs
24, University of Sydney, Sydney, 182-200.
 CHAPTER

l CLASSIFYING THE
WORLD IN AN
ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE

Michael Walsh

INTRODUCTION

I n every language there is an attempt to classify the world. While speakers are
often unaware of it, a little reflection will show that it must be so. One of the
more important functions of language is to transmit one person's impressions of
the world to another. Given that each person's impressions are a product of their
own individual experience, there must be some process of generalising from these
highly individual impressions so as to communicate to others. Even as banal a
pronouncement as 'I saw a cat' involves a number of choices about the classification
of the world: self versus other ('I' versus 'you, she, they' et cetera); some kind
of generalised visual perception: 'see' versus 'notice, glance at, caught sight of'
et cetera; and some notion of 'catness' that sets that specific object off from 'other'
objects in the world ('dogs, trees, people' et cetera) and at the same time relates
that object to other objects of the 'same' kind (other cats). The very process of
viewing some objects in the world as 'same' and some as 'other' is a matter of
classification. Without this process language would become unworkable: a separate
word for each 'catlike object' one ever encounters? Even then those separate words
would separate one speaker from another. For language to work it must be based
on a communally accepted classification of the world.
While every language classifies the world in some way, some languages
oblige their speakers to assign objects in the world to a relatively small number
of classes. In French, for example, each noun is assigned to one of just two classes,
referred to as 'masculine' and 'feminine':
masculine feminine
cadeau 'gift' cloche 'bell'
chou 'cabbage' craie 'chalk'
doigt 'finger' dent 'tooth'
fromage 'cheese' foule 'crowd'
pied 'foot' patte 'paw'
Membership in a noun class has grammatical consequences: a 'masculine' noun
like cadeau 'gift' will appear as Ie cadeau for 'the gift' and un cadeau 'a gift' while
a 'feminine' noun like cloche 'bell' will appear as la cloche for 'the bell' and une
cloche 'a bell'. A speaker of French cannot decide to reclassify 'cheese' and say
*lafromage. Whatever the basis of the classification, it is fixed.
108 MICHAEL WALSH

In much the same way in German there are just three classes -
masculine, feminine and neuter:
masculine feminine neuter
Wein 'wine' Limonade 'lemonade' Bier 'beer'
R e 'tea' Milch 'milk' Wasser 'water'

This classification can suggest something of the way the speakers see
the world. In Swahili there are as many as eighteen classes: one class refers to
long, thin objects like 'wall', 'sword', 'river' and 'tongue', another includes most
names of animals and kinship terms while another has words for abstract qualities
like 'peace', 'evil' and 'beauty'. Among Australian Aboriginal languages are some
languages, like Nunggubuyu (Heath 1984), which seem to behave like French in
that there is no obvious reason why a noun should belong to one class rather than
another; and there are many other languages which pattern more like Swahili,
in that there is a fairly clear motivation for class membership. One such language
is Murrinh-Patha,spoken by around 1,500 people on the west coast of the Northern
Territory.
In Murrinh-Patha each noun can be associated with a 'noun class
marker' (abbreviated as NC). The noun class marker appears before the noun but
differs in function from the French forms Ie versus la ('the') or un versus une ('a'),
mentioned above. Membership in noun classes is semantically based (Stanner 1964;
Street 1987, 41-44; Walsh forthcoming), for example:
(ku) baybaye
NC kangaroo
(thu) kuragadha
NC boomerang
(mi) lawam
NC flour
Members of the kit-class include animals, birds, fish, et cetera and their products
(honey, eggs, meat et cetera), the thu-class refers to offensive weapons and the
wit-class relates to fruit and vegetable food.
In all, around ten noun classes might be distinguished for Murrinh-
Patha. Street (1987,41-44) sets up ten noun classes which are semantically based.
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 109

The list below follows Street but is supplemented by examples of my own.

1. kardu Aboriginal people and human classification (including human spirits)
kardu thipmam 'black person [that is, Aboriginal]'
kardu pule 'old man; husband; boss'
kardu ngepan 'spiritlsoul of a living person'
kardu warnangkal 'clever man; "witch doctor" '
kardu kawu 'mother's mother'

2. ku Non-Aboriginal people and all other animates and their products.

ku thipmam 'black person [non-Aboriginal]'

ku pule 'old man; husband; boss [non-Aboriginal]'
ku warnangkal 'clever man; doctor [non-Aboriginal]'
ku kulerrkkurrk 'brolga'
ku lawarnka 'wallaby'
ku murl 'fly'
ku thitay '(wild) honey, sugarbag'

3. kura Fresh water and associated concepts, as potable fluids (except 'milk'
which is in Class 5 ) , and different collective terms for fresh water like 'rain' or
'river'.
kura thurrulk 'beer (= foam water)'
kura ngipilinh creek, river'
kura yelyel 'rain'

4. mi Flowers and fruits of plants and any vegetable foods. Also faeces.

mi thathangadhay 'flower of certain trees'

mi marrarl 'fruit of native tree ( l k m i n a l i a
ferdinandiana)'
mi lawam flour'
mi ngukin 'faeces'

5 . nanthi Essentially a residue category, in that a noun can usually be assigned

to the nanthi-class if it does not obviously fit into any of the other nine classes
which are relatively well-defined. This class includes most inanimate objects,
implements and natural phenomena of all kinds.

nanthi thelput 'house'

nanthi wirrirr 'wind'
nanthi thay 'stick'
110 MICHAEL WALSH

6. thamul Spears.

thamul nguni 'short light spear'

thamul menek 'ironwood spear'
thamul waya 'fishing spear; "fish wire" '

7. thu Offensive weapons (defensive weapons like shields predictably go into

the nanthi-class). Thunder and lightning. Playing cards.

thu kuragadha boomerang'

thu paku large club'
thu malarntath 'thunder; lightning'
thu kat 'playing cards'

8. thungku Fire and things associated with fire.

thungku thay 'firestick; firewood'
thungku len 'hot coals'
thungku methith 'matches

9. da Time and space: names for localities, seasons et cetera.

da pemanhay 'sandhill'
da therri "dry grass time"; latter part of the dry
season'
da yidiyi 'Yidiyi (place name)'

10. murrinh Speech and language and associated concepts such as news, songs,
school.
murrinh mamay 'baby talk; children's talk'
murrinh thelerrdhe 'news'
murrinh school 'school'

MULTIPLE MEMBERSHIP IN NOUN CLASSES

A particular noun may occur in a number of noun classes according to its function
or according to the way it is viewed in the culture. When a boomerang is considered
merely as an object and not as an offensive weapon, it will be assigned to the
mnthi-class. So nanthi kuragadha might be said of a boomerang employed as
a doorstop or as an improvised back-scratcher. Although lawam 'flour' can be
assigned to the mi-class because it is a foodstuff derived from plants, &hi lawam
is used to refer to flour bought in a shop. The examples given above show some
human classification terms turning up in the kardu-class as well as the kit-class.
In mythological texts the transformation of culture heroes, who are regarded as
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE Ill

human beings, into birds or animals is signalled by a switch from one noun class
t o another: so kardu kulerrkkurrk 'Brolgar-man]' becomes ku kulerrkkurrk
brolga'.
Often a semantic domain will be captured by a singular noun class
marker. Most body parts, for instance, belong to the nanthi-class. One category
of body products is assigned to the mi-class: m i ngukin '(solid) faeces'; m i yilulul
'liquid faeces'. Presumably the association is between food and that body product
which is itself the product of food (mican be used generically to refer to 'food').
All other body products, whether blood, sputum or urine, are assigned to the
nanthi-class.
For some body parts it is possible to switch noun classes with an
attendant change in meaning:
nanthi kamarl 'eyelface'
kura kamarl 'water-hole'
kardu kamarl 'sweetheart'
mi kamarl 'seed'
nanthi ngi 'penis'
ku ngi 'death adder'
nanthi nginipunh 'body'
murrinh nginipunh 'skin(-name)'
nanthi pangkin 'back'
da pangkin 'ridge'

In these sets of expressions it is certainly the body-part meaning which

is basic. When a term in one of these sets occurs without a noun class marker,
the usual meaning for that term is the body-part sense. In addition, native speakers
spontaneously volunteer glosses for the 'other' meanings in a way that suggests
that the body-part sense is seen as being basic: 'the seed is round like your eye';
t h a t snake looks like that "man-thing'".
Each noun will have a m association with a particular noun class
marker. The word yirrthip 'cat', for instance, has the norm association with the
particular noun class marker, ku, but may be reassigned to other classes because
of a marked usage:
ku yirrthip
NC cat
cat-as-cat'
thu yirrthip
NC cat
'cat-as-offensive-weapon'
112 MICHAEL WALSH

nanthi yirrthip
NC cat
'cat-as-object'
In the first instance, ku yirrthip, has its ordinary, expected meaning of a cat as
we usually expect a cat to be - according to its inherent nature. The other two
usages put the inherent characteristics of the cat to the background and focus
on functional characteristics. If one were to pick up a cat by its hind leg and hit
someone with it, the cat has become thu yirrthip - it is a cat being used as an
offensive weapon. If a cat is used as an object, for example, as a foot-warmer or
a doorstop, then it becomes nunthi yirrthip because of this change of function.
Another example is provided by tumtum 'egg':
ku tumtum
NC egg
'egg-as-egg'
thu tumtum
NC egg
'egg-as-offensive weapon'
nanthi tumtum
NC egg
'egg-as-object'
In the first usage tumtum is in the ku-class because it is the product of creatures
such as ku thikin 'chicken', ku kananganthan 'emu' or ku nguw 'loggerhead (large
saltwater) turtle', which by their inherent characteristics naturally fit into the ku-
class. But an egg used as a missile predictably becomes thu tumtum because
functionally it has become an offensive weapon. Finally, an egg used as a
paperweight or some such must be assigned to the nanthi-class.
When a noun occurs in its most basic or normal sense, more often than
not the noun class marker is omitted.

PROTOTVPICAL CHARACTERISATION

The contents of noun classes are often superficially heterogeneous but can be
characterised in terms of certain central notions. Dixon (1968)provides an example
of this in the four-class system of Dyirbal, and Lakoff (1986) shows how more
general characterisations of the Dyirbal noun classes can be expressed in terms
of prototypes. Here, something of the same sort is applied to Murrinh-Patha. I
repeat the earlier examples, slightly rearranging the categories so as to put the
nanthi-class, which is the most general, at the end.
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN A N ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 113

1. kardu Higher animates,

kardu thipmam 'black person [that is, Aboriginal]

kardu pule bold man; "husband"; boss'
kardu ngepan 'spiritlsoul of a living person'
kardu warnangkal 'clever man; "witch doctor" '
kardu kawu 'mother's mother'

Other animates.

ku thipmam 'black person [non-Aboriginal]'

ku pule 'old man; "husband"; boss
[non-Aboriginal]'
ku warnangkal 'clever man; doctor [non-Aboriginal]'
ku kulerrkkurrk 'brolga'
ku lawarnka 'wallaby'
ku murl 'fly'
ku thitay '(wild) honey, sugarbag'

3. kura Fresh water.

kura thurrulk 'beer (= foam water)'

kura ngipilinh 'creek, river'
kura yelyel 'rain'

4. mi Food.

mi thathangadhay 'flower of certain trees'

mi marrarl 'fruit of native tree (Terminalia
ferdinandiana)'
mi lawam 'flour'
mi ngukin 'faeces'

5 . thamul Spears.

thamul nguni short light spear'

thamul menek 'ironwood spear'
thamul waya 'fishing spear; "fish wire" '

6. thu Strikers.

thu kuragadha boomerang'

thu paku 'large club'
thu malarntath 'thunder; lightning'
thu kat 'playing cards'
114 MICHAEL WALSH

7. thungku Fire.

thungku thay firestick; firewood'

thungku len h o t coals'
thungku methith 'matches'

8. da Time and space.

da pemanhay 'sandhill'
da therri ' d r y grass time"; latter part of the
dry season'
da yidiyi 'Yidiyi (place name)'

9. murrinh Speech and language.

murrinh mamay baby talk; children's talk'

murrinh thelerrdhe 'news'
murrinh school 'school'

10. nanthi Everything else.

nanthi thelput 'house'

nanthi wirrirr wind'
nanthi thay 'stick'

DISCUSSION

Class 1. kardu Higher animates. As in English the category of 'higher

animates' is culturally conceived. In Murrinh-Patha the category of 'higher
animates' is often thought of as just involving Aboriginal people while non-
Aboriginal people are classified along with other animates like snakes, birds and
fish. In English the grammar of the language distinguishes between higher animates
and everything else through the use of personal pronouns:
higher animates other
it
its
People are almost always assigned to the higher animate class in
English, although a baby is sometimes referred to as 'it' when the sex is not known.
But some animals are also assigned to this class, especially pets:
She has distemper/fleas; let's take her to the vet.
His coat has become matted.
We're having him speyed.
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 115

Speakers of English vary as to which nouns fall into this implicit class
of higher animates: some think of cats as almost human and would always assign
them to the class of higher animates while other speakers regard cats with
indifference or even as something of a nuisance and assign them to the other class.
The border between higher animates and others is not sharply defined
in either English or Murrinh-Patha. Even so most nouns can be assigned to one
class or the other without hesitation.

Class 2. ku Other animates. This class includes not only animals, birds,
insects, fish, and marine life but can include the products of these animates such
as 'bird's nest', 'eggs' and 'honey'. Interestingly, the general term for 'money' in
Murrinh-Patha is ku which also translates as 'meat'. The latter meaning is fairly
predictable since meat is the product of most of the nouns classified in the ku-
class. The sense of ku as 'money' presumably derives from the Murrinh-Patha view
that 'money' is a product of non-Aboriginal people whom they assign to the
ku-class.

Class 3. kura Fresh water. That this is a separate class suggests that
fresh water holds a prominent place in the culture of the Murrinh-Patha.

Class 4. m i Food. The mi-class is a little problematic to characterise

simply. We cannot call it the class which refers to plants because plants-as-plants
for the most part are assigned to the nanthi-class - for example nanthi were
'thorny bush'. It is only plants-as-food that belong to the mi-class and something
like nanthi were 'thorny bush' is not regarded as having much potential as food.
I suspect, though, that if one were reduced to using nanthi were 'thorny bush'
for food, then it would be reassigned to the mi-class.
What of 'faeces'? Two explanations spring to mind. The most
straightforward is that, from a Murrinh-Patha perspective, faeces is seen as the
product of objects from the mi-class (things like m i lawam 'flour', m i yidingum
'tamarind fruit', m i kugalng 'Kurrajong fruit (Brachy'chiton diversifolium)', m i
palathi 'fruit of Billy goat plum tree (Planchonia careya)', to mention just a few).
One might then wonder about food from the ku-class which would contribute to
this 'product', so why not call it *ku ngukin? The second explanation may throw
some light on this problem: when tracking animals, Aboriginal people look out
for droppings as well as footprints. Often these droppings have the appearance
of being the product of items from the mi-class. Kangaroo droppings, for instance,
are sometimes likened to dried grass. Given that it is culturally salient to look closely
at samples of ngukin from such animals, it seems reasonable that ngukin would
be associated with the mi-class.
116 MICHAEL WALSH

Class 5 . thamul Spears. This class suggests that spears hold a

prominent place in the culture of the Murrinh-Patha.

Class 6. thu Strikers. In this class are brought together those things
which can be thought of as striking something else. The earlier characterisation
as 'offensive weapons' is partly right in that such weapons are used to strike
someone, in contrast to defensive weapons which are more involved in blocking
an impact. But this view does not account for playing cards or thunder and
lightning. Playing cards are thrown into the centre of the card-playing group and
strike the ground, so they fit readily into this class. Similarly, it is easy enough
to conceive of thunder and lightning as something which strikes something else.

Class 7. thungku Fire. This class suggests that fire holds a prominent
place in the culture of the Murrinh-Patha.

Class 8. da Time and space. In this noun-class time and place are
linked. This is not surprising given that many cultures make such linkages and
reflect that linkage in the language.

Class 9. murrinh Speech and language. This class suggests that speech
and language hold a prominent place in the culture of the Murrinh-Patha.

Class 10. nanthi Everything else. The nanthi-class is certainly the most
heterogeneous: it includes all those items which do not obviously fit into any of
the other nine categories. In an approximate way the nanthi-class in Murrinh-
Patha serves the same function as 'things' in English. That is to say, it is a residue
category which one uses when some entity fits into no other positively defined
category. Not surprisingly, most introduced items from English-speaking Australia
are assigned to the nanthi-class, for example:
nanthi kum 'bottle'
nanthi cassette 'tape recorder'

CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN ENGLISH

Let us now return to something more familiar: how do we classify the world in
English? This is far too big a subject to go into in any detail here but a few issues
can be raised.
One way in which speakers of English classify the world is in the use
of collective nouns. As with Murrinh-Patha it will not always be obvious to anyone,
let alone the native speakers, what the motivation is for grouping certain things
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 117

together. Consider collective nouns like 'flock', 'pack' or 'swarm'. We refer to a flock
of galahs and a flock of sheep, a pack of cards and a pack of dogs, a swarm of bees
and a swarm of locusts. Two questions arise: what kinds of nouns can be subsumed
under a given collective noun? and to what extent can one reassign a given noun
to a different collective? The first question makes us wonder what it is, if anything,
that galahs and sheep, cards and dogs, or bees and locusts have in common. The
second question considers whether we can sensibly refer to a pack of galahs or a
swarm of galahs, to a flock of cards or a swarm of cards, or to a flock of locusts
or a pack of locusts. Some collective terms are no longer in familiar usage so that
speakers will use different collective terms to group together the same entities.
Whales, for example, can be grouped as a 'pod of whales', although many speakers
would be more likely to refer to them as a 'school of whales' generalisingfrom 'school
of fish' and thereby implicitly treating whales and fish as entities of the same kind.
This raises questions about the currency and utility of some of the collective terms.
Another area of English which involves an implicit classification of nouns
is to be found in the use of pronouns. Earlier it was shown that there is a basic
distinction in pronouns between higher animates and everything else. It therefore
becomes strange to use the distinctive higher animate personal pronouns with certain
creatures:
?Look at that amoeba (under the microscope), isn't he pretty?
?Watch out for that slug, you almost stepped on himher.
It is not a matter of needing to know the sex of what is being referred
to for a speaker to use the higher animate personal pronouns: speakers will describe
a cat as 'he' when they have no idea of what sex it is while other speakers will
relentlessly describe a cat as an 'it' despite its ginger coat and prominent 'equipment'.
In the same way a bull or a cow may be described as an 'it'. Moreover, it may happen
that a speaker is only distantly aware of the sexual identification of the creature
concerned:
Look at that peacock. Doesn't it have a magnificent tail?
The speaker can be reminded that it is only the male that has this prominent display
of plumage and that the very word 'peacock' (versus 'peahen') indicates maleness.
But for many speakers 'it' is used to describe a peacock, a peahen and any other
kind of bird.

CLASSIFYJNG THE WORLD IN OTHER ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

Although a range of Aboriginal languages have noun classification systems, most
of these are not well-documented. A notable exception is Dyirbal, a language
118 MICHAEL WALSH

traditionally spoken in northern Queensland, described by R.M.W. Dixon (1982). In

Dyirbal before each noun there must appear one of four forms (or variants of these
four forms): bayi, bulan, balam, bala. Here is a summary of the kinds of nouns
that must be assigned to the four classes (Lakoff 1987, 92-3):
I. Bagi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most
insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, et cetera.
11. Bulan: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes, some fishes,
most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected
with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees, et cetera.
111. Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey,
cigarettes, wine, cake.
IV. Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yamsticks, some spears, most trees,
grass, mud, stones, noises and language, et cetera.
As with Murrinh-Patha an initial examination of the contents of these
classes makes one wonder how Dyirbal people categorise things. Why, for instance,
are spears distributed across three classes? Why do most trees appear in Class IV
but some trees in Classes I and II? Even more surprising is the occurrence of the
moon in one class but the sun and stars in another. But Dixon is able to give a more
general characterisation of the classes (1968, 1982):
I. Bayi: (human) males; animals
11. Balan: (human) females; water; fire; fighting
111. Balam: non-flesh food
IV. Bala: everything not in the other classes
If this were the whole explanation, it would open up as many questions
as it answers. Class I does contain many animals but there are also animals in Class
11; most trees end up in the residue class (IV) but some trees appear in Classes I,
I1 and 111. Part of the explanation lies in associations between certain nouns (as it
did in Murrinh-Patha). Spears used for fishing appear in Class I because that is where
fish naturally belong; but spears used for fighting appear in Class 11, the class
associated with fighting, while other spears are relegated to Class IV. Stars and
fireflies appear in Class 11, the class which has associations with fire.
Most of the remaining nouns which are hard to account for can be
handled by two explanatory principles developed by Dixon. One reason concerns
traditional Dyirbal myth or belief. In traditional stories the moon and the sun were
thought of as husband and wife, and so the moon is assigned to Class I because
it can be thought of as a human male while the sun is in Class I1 because it is a
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 119

human female. Most birds are in Class 11, rather than Class I as we might expect,
because in Dyirbal belief birds were seen as the spirits of dead human females. But
some birds like Willie wagtails were thought to be men in myth and are therefore
in Class I. The other explanatory principle involves some nouns having a special
property which sets them off from other like nouns. Most fish, for instance, are
in Class I with other animates, as one would expect, but the stonefish and the garfish
have a special property - they are both harmful - and are assigned to a different
class from the other fish. Hawks are also regarded as harmful and appear in Class
I rather than in Class I1 with the other birds (appearing there because of their
mythical associations).
Using all these principles, most loan concepts can be accounted for. Flour,
cake and wine all appear in Class 111 as one would expect: flour is derived from
plants; in turn, cake employs flour and may contain fruit; wine is derived from
grapes, a kind of edible plant. Cigarettes are also in this class, being thought of as
derived from leaves (of tobacco). Pipes and matches appear in Class I1 being
associated with fire. Predictably the Dyirbal word for white woman, mwi (derived
from the English word 'missus'), is assigned to Class 11.
A small number of nouns seem to resist explanation in terms of these
explanatory principles. The loan concept, money, appears unpredictably in Class
I when one might have thought it would appear in Class IV. There is no explanation
given by Dixon for the appearance of bandicoot, dog, echidna and platypus in Class
I1 when general principles would have them in Class I with other animates. It is
easy enough to speculate about an explanation for some of these apparent
exceptions: dogs have the special property among animals of being domesticated
by Aboriginal people; and in the tradition of Western science the echidna and
platypus are regarded as being animals with special properties (egg-laying mammals),
so perhaps Aboriginal people also regard them as having special properties and have
reflected that in their own system of classification.
It needs to be stressed that these suggestions must remain speculative.
Even Dyirbal people may not be - or may no longer be - conscious of the principles
underlying their classification system. Whatever their origins, the systems of
categorisation presented in a brief form here for Dyirbal, English and Murrinh-Patha
throw some light on the range of ways that people classify the world.
Linguists and others have pondered the effect of differing classification
systems from different cultures. In part, this is a 'chicken-and-egg' question. Does
the language you grow up using influence the way you perceive the world because
of its inbuilt perceptual and conceptual grid? Or is it that the culture (and even
the environment) shapes the perceptual and conceptual grid which has developed
in the language? There is no short answer to these questions, intriguing as they might
120 MICHAEL WALSH

be. But we can confidently say that different languages have quite distinct ways
of presenting the world. By looking at some features of classification in Aboriginal
languages we can gain some insight into another way of looking at the world. In
turn, this can help us to reflect on the way we see the world ourselves.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, NOTES AND BACKGROUND

1. A quite accessible account of noun classification in Swahili can be found in
Hinnebusch (1979).
2. The data on Murrinh-Patha are drawn from my own fieldwork and from the
very extensive knowledge of Chester Street of the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
Australian Aborigines Branch. I have relied heavily on Street's detailed knowledge
of the lexicon of Murrinh-Patha which is partly documented in Street's (1983)
dictionary (see also Street 1987). Otherwise, I owe a debt to my Murrinh-Patha
language instructors, especially Kevin Bunduck and the late Harry Kulampurrurt
and the late Jumbo Dala. The fieldwork was supported by grants from the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies: my thanks go to this body for making the fieldwork
possible and to its staff for their considerable assistance. A fuller account of nominal
classification is provided in Walsh (forthcoming).
3. The orthography adopted here is identical to that developed by the Summer
Institute of Linguistics literacy team, Chester and Lyn Street, and now in use by
the literate speakers of Murrinh-Patha. Stops are as follows: p, b; t, d; and k, g are
essentially as in English; rt, rd are voiceless and voiced retroflex; th is voiceless
and laminal, being dental before /a, U/ and palatal before /i, el; dh is voiced and
laminal, realised as a voiced laminointerdental fricative before /a, U/and as a voiced
laminopalatal stop before /i, e/. Nasals are bilabial m, laminal nh (dental before /a,
U/and palatal before /i, e/), alveolar n, retroflex rn and velar ng. Laterals are alveolar
1and retroflex rl. Rhotics are semi-retroflex continuant r and alveolar flapltrill rr.
There are four vowels: i, e, a, U.
4. The distinction between 'inherent nature' and 'functional characteristics' has
been raised by a number of commentators on classification. See Allan (1977), Denny
(1976), Dixon (1986) and Lee (1988).
5 . I am grateful to Nick Reid for suggesting the term 'strikers' in reference to the
noun classification system of a neighbouring language, Ngan'gikurrunggurr. I also
thank Patrick McConvell for drawing my attention to the possible relationship
between dried grass and animal droppings.
CLASSIFYING THE WORLD IN AN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE 121

FOR DISCUSSION
1. In Murrinh-Patha a word for 'sand' is darrimun and this term is extended to
refer to the foodstuff introduced by whites: 'sugar'. Why was the same word used
for 'sand' and 'sugar'? What noun class is darrimun 'sand' assigned to? What noun
class is darrimun 'sugar' assigned to? Why?

2. We have already seen the expression thungku rriethith 'matches'. What does
thu tnethith refer to?

3. The noun, were, is usually assigned to the ku-class, where it refers to 'dog', but
it may also appear in the nanthi-class, where it refers to a kind of 'thorny bush'.
Is there a semantic connection or is it merely chance? How would you go about
finding out? What would kardu were refer to?
4. The expression, thamul menek, translates as 'ironwood spear'. What would you
expect nanthi metwk to mean?
5 . The term, muthingha, can be assigned to the ku-class to mean 'old woman (non-
Aboriginal)' as well a s to the kardu-class to indicate 'old woman (Aboriginal)'. What
does thu muthinqka refer to?
6. Consider the following Murrinh-Patha nouns:

karrak 'kookaburra'
wakal 'baby'
putek 'earth'
mayiyin 'dragon fly'
mulurn 'leaf'
dara 'mangrove'
birlmalu 'policeman'
ngakumarl 'totem'
thigath 'urine'
What would you expect to be the normal or basic noun class for each word. Why?
Construct a context to put each noun into another noun class.
7. mayiyin 'dragon fly' is also used for the new concept 'helicopter'. Why? What
noun class would mayiyin be assigned to in its meaning of 'helicopter'?

8. Considering the Dyirbal noun class system and noting that some of these nouns
might be assigned to more than one class depending on the perspective taken, how
would one expect the following nouns to be assigned? Why?
cigarette-lighter spear
shark meat pie
toy cassowary
REFERENCES
Allan, K.
1977 Classifiers, Language 53 (2), 284-310.
Craig, C. (ed)
1986 Noun Classes and Categorization, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Denny, J.P.
1976 What are Noun Classifiers Good For? In Proceedings of the Twelfth
Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Dixon, R.M.W.
1968 Noun Classes, Lingua XXI, 104-25 [also published in Dixon 19821.
1982 Classifiers in Yidiny. In R.M.W. Dixon (ed), Where Have All the
Adjectives Gone?, Mouton, Berlin.
1986 Noun Classes and Noun Classification in Typological Perspective. In
Colette Craig (ed).
Heath, J.
1984 A Functional Grammar of Nunggubuyu, Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
Hinnebusch, T.
1979 Swahili. In T. Shopen (ed), Languages and Their Status, Winthrop,
Cambridge, MA.
Lakoff, G .
1986 Classifiers as a Reflection of Mind. In Colette Craig fed) 1986.
1987 Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Lee, M.
1988 Language, Perception and the World. In J. Hawkins (ed) Explaining
Language Universals, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Stanner, W.E.H.
1964 On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monographs, Sydney.
Street, C.
1983 EmjUsh-Murrinh-Patha Dictionury, Wadeye Press, Port Keats, NT.
1987 An Introduction to the Language a n d Culture of the Muwinh-Patha,
Summer Institute of Linguistics, Australian Aborigines Branch, Darwin.
Walsh, M.
forth-
coming Nominal Classification in Murrinh-Patha. In M. Harvey and N. Reid
(eds), Nominal Classification i n Australian Languages, Pacific
Linguistics, Canberra.
 CHAPTER

MAKING
DICTIONARIES

Jane Simpson

ne of the questions commonly asked about Aboriginal languages is: how many
words do they have? In this chapter we explore the answers to this apparently
simple question. In doing so, we have to consider how many words there can be
in any language. In turn, we examine the ways in which the words of a language
can be documented and the purposes for which this task are undertaken. In short
- making dictionaries.

HOW MANY WORDS ARE THERE IN A LANGUAGE?

People often try to compare languages in terms of the numbers of words the
languages have. They may even do so by comparing the sizes of the largest
dictionaries available for the two languages. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary:
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, second edition) is, in twenty
fat volumes, much bigger than the sixty-three page vocabulary of the Adelaide
language in Tsichelmann and Schurmann (1840).
This is clearly not a fair comparison, for many reasons. But the main
reason is the basis for such a comparison. How do we measure the number of words
in a language? First, what is a word? For instance, should the compound 'firehose'
be treated as a single word different from 'fire' and 'hose'? Languages differ widely
as to what is considered a word. Second, are we talking about all words ever used
by any speakers of that language? Or about all words used currently? Or about
all the words used by an individual speaker and, presumably, stored somehow in
that speaker's mind? Or about all the words ever recorded of the language? These
questions show how hard it is to compare languages with respect to the number
of words in them.

ASSEMBLAGES OF WORDS
Let us look at the terms which the English language has developed for assemblages
of words. Many of these, unfortunately, overlap in meaning. Thus, the total of words
in a language is sometimes called the lexicon or vocabulary of the language
('lexicon' from the Greek lexis speech, word, phrase; 'vocabulary' from the Latin
voca:bulum, a name). Now, if the language is taken to consist of all the words
ever uttered by speakers of that language, it is not possible to have a complete
124 JANE SIMPSON

record of the vocabulary of the language. Many words are never recorded because
they have such a short life span, and hence never make it into dictionaries. But
it is possible to gather a lexicon of most of the words ever recorded as being part
of a particular language. Dictionaries like the OED which are organised along
historical principles have this as a goal. A language which has a long history of
writing will have dictionaries containing more words than languages which have
a short history of writing. But such dictionaries will contain many obsolete or
archaic words, not used by present-day speakers.
Another way of looking at the lexicon of a language is to narrow it
down to the words known by present-day speakers. Dictionaries described as
'Contemporary English' are of this type. Different speakers know different words,
resulting from their different specialisations. So the number of words known by
any of the community of present-day English speakers is much greater than the
number of words known by any one speaker of English. We have in effect a
linguistic division of labour; we divide among ourselves the labour of knowing
the meanings of different words, or knowing the meanings to different degrees
of precision. For example, I know that a grebe is a kind of water-bird and I assume
that ornithologists know more precisely what a grebe is, and can say 'This bird
is a grebe; that bird is not a grebe'. Many of the words in a dictionary of
contemporary English I do not know, but I assume that among the community
of present-day English speakers are some people who use these words because
they know what they mean.
When we talk of someone's ability to use words, we sometimes say
shehe has a wide vocabulary. The words known by a speaker are sometimes also
called the speaker's mental lexicon. They range over a continuum. At one end
are those that we know actively (we understand and use them). At the other end
are those that we know passively (we understand them, but would never use them).
Allowing for individual variation, and for the fact that what counts as a word differs
from language to language, the number of words used by the average speaker (her
or his active vocabulary) probably does not differ significantly across languages.
The word 'vocabulary', however, can mean something different:
language-teaching textbooks often contain texts accompanied by lists of the words
in the text with explanations. Such a list is often called a vocabulary or a glossary
(glossary from the Latin g1o:ssa 'word that needs explanation'). A glossary consists
of a list of words and glosses (explanations of the meanings of the words).
Notice that with these meanings of 'glossary' and 'vocabulary', we are
introducing another type of word assemblage - written collections of words.
Written language provides a way of preserving older stages of a language. Spoken
MAKING DICTIONARIES 125

language changes as each generation learns it, while written language preserves
older words and older pronunciations.
When texts of written language are highly valued in a culture, such
as the Chinese Classics (written from the eighth century BC onwards), younger
people may be expected to learn to understand the older texts, even though the
language is unfamiliar to them. And so commentaries on the texts may be made,
explaining unfamiliar ideas, references to people and places, and including
glossaries of unfamiliar words. This glossary may lead on to the preparation of
a full-scale reference book containing an explanatory list of words, that is, a word-
book, dictionary (from the Latin dictio 'choice and use of words'), or thesaurus
(from the Latin the:saurus, 'treasure'). Thus, by AD 100 there was a dictionary
of Chinese which helped the current generation read and pronounce the language
used in the Classics. This was an early monolingual dictionary, a dictionary in which
the words of one language are explained in the language itself.
Dictionary is the general cover-term for such a reference book.
However, sometimes dictionaries are contrasted with word-books, word-lists and
thesauri in different ways. Dictionaries contrast with ordinary word-lists and word-
books by having complex entries (that is, the explanatory material associated with
a word). Making dictionaries has become a specialised trade, known as lexicography,
while dictionary-makers are called lexicographers.
A specialised kind of monolingual dictionary, a special purpose
dictionary, arises when a society with a written language develops areas of
specialisation, such as trades, which have their own specialised vocabulary.
Learning the trade becomes in part learning the terms of the trade, and so
dictionaries of these terms are useful in helping this process. In 1527 one of the
earliest English special purpose dictionaries, a glossary of law terms, was published.
Another kind of dictionary, a bilingual dictionary, is needed when
writers of one language are learning to write another language. For example, some
of the earliest Babylonian texts (seventh century BC) are word-lists, showing
Sumerian pronunciations and Akkadian equivalents, thus enabling translation from
the spoken language (Akkadian) into the language used for writing (Sumerian),
and perhaps acting as a spelling guide. Until very recently, all dictionaries of
Aboriginal languages have been bilingual dictionaries, the language of explanation
being English in most cases (exceptions include the Diyari-German dictionary of
J.G. Reuther, and the Arrernte-German dictionary of Car1 Strehlow). But with
Aborigines learning to read and write their own languages, some have started to
prepare monolingual dictionaries.
126 JANE SIMPSON

WORD STORAGE IN AN ORAL CULTURE

Traditional Aboriginal societies had no large-scalewriting systems, and so had oral

cultures. Dictionaries are products of written cultures. Nevertheless, some of the
functions of dictionaries have to be carried out in oral cultures too - learning
words from other languages, explaining words from older stages of a language,
explaining specialised terms. The first function, learning other languages, can be
done orally, with little formal instruction. Traditional Aboriginal societies are, and
were, multilingual societies. People learn other languages through having to talk
to speakers of other languages, because of marriage, because of visiting for long
periods in other people's country, and because of a widespread convention of
politeness that requires one to speak the language of the country one is visiting.
But the second two functions require greater efforts of memory and
of social cooperation. Archaic language may be preserved in songs, and this is
certainly true of the language of important song cycles of Aboriginal Australia.
Young people learning the songs may be instructed by their teachers as to what
the songs mean. In doing so they learn the older words preserved in the songs.
Specialised terms of a trade will be learned by an apprentice from a master, as
part of learning the trade. In Aboriginal Australia, this may include terms used
in ceremonies, or even an entire respect language of the kind described by Alpher
earlier (in chapter 7).
For words from older stages of the language or specialised terms of
trade to be passed on, teachers must preserve information in their memories, while
learners must train their memories, in order to learn. Socially accepted conventions
of teacher-pupil relations develop so as to pass on information, while, in the society
as a whole, there may be a division of labour as to who remembers what, and
also as to how to keep a check on this.
The division of memory labour and of keeping check on memories has
been achieved in many Australian Aboriginal societies by efficient social structures.
In many areas, responsibility for knowing the songs, myths and ceremonies for
different tracts of land is divided among people according to their family
relationships. Sisters and brothers have responsibility for remembering information
about both their mother's country and their father's country. A man must pass
on to his children the knowledge of his father's country, and his sister passes on
to her brother's children the knowledge of her father's country. A brother and
sister's responsibility for their mother's country requires them to check that the
knowledge about that country is being correctly passed on to those whose father's
country it is (their mother's brother's children, for example). Likewise, some of
their other cousins (father's sister's children) will check that the sister and brother
MAKING DICTIONARIES 127

are correctly passing on information about the country belonging to their common
grandfather (father of both the cousins' mother and the brother and sister's father).
Concern with ensuring correct transmission of information has
apparently been a part of Aboriginal societies for a long time. It is perhaps not
surprising, then, that many traditional Aboriginal people have been interested in
writing as a means of recording information, as a way of ensuring transmission
of information, not simply to Europeans, but to their own grandchildren. Likewise,
they have often enthusiastically taken part in dictionary-making, or made their
own dictionaries, as a way of recording words and the associated concepts,
artefacts, animals, plants, which they feel would otherwise be lost.

THE FIRST WORD-LISTS OF ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

Word-lists of Aboriginal languages go back to Cook's voyage to

Australia, during which Joseph Banks recorded some words of Guugu Yimidhirr,
spoken near Cooktown. Banks's purpose was scientific, to record a sample of the
language spoken by the people they met, just as he recorded the plants and animals
they encountered. As Troy describes (in chapter 3), the people from the First Fleet
tried to use Banks's list for communication, and were surprised to find that the
words recorded by Banks were not always understood by the local people.
Most of the best early vocabularies of Aboriginal languages come from
missionaries. One of the earliest was that of Lancelot Threlkeld, who was sent
in 1825 by the London Missionary Society to start work a t Lake Macquarie, 110
kilometres north of Sydney. The Society encouraged their missionaries to learn
the native languages in order to translate the scriptures into those languages and
preach the gospel more effectively. As a result of learning Awaba, the local
language, Threlkeld published in 1834 An Australian Grammar (Threlkeld 1834),
which included the first extensive word-list of an Australian Aboriginal language
to be published.
Threlkeld's reason for publishing was partly scientific, and partly
educational. He wanted to show the colonists that the Aborigines were human.
As he writes:
it was maintained by many in the colony that the Blacks
had no language at all but were only a race of the monkey
tribe! This was a convenient assumption, for if it could be
proved that the Aborigines of New South Wales were only
a species of wild beast, there could be no guilt attached
to those who shot them off or poisoned them as cumberers
of the earth. (p 46)
128 JANE SIMPSON

Threlkeld decided not to use English spelling principles to write the Aboriginal
language, because of the ambiguity and redundancy of the English spelling system.
Instead, he adopted the spelling system that had been used by missionaries in the
South Pacific. As a result he had to give an explicit pronunciation key, which makes
his renderings of Awaba words less liable to mispronunciation.
Words in the word-list are listed (or ordered) in groups. These groups
consist of lists of words on a particular topic. 'Ibpics include names of persons,
names of places, parts of the body. As well, some groups consist of words with
the same grammatical category (part of speech), such as common nouns. Within
these groups, words are listed more or less according to alphabetic o r d e ~
The entries
are not complex, but do contain occasional ethnographic comments (see below
for an example). Hence I have called it a word-list, rather than a dictionary.
Head word English Gloss Comment (ethnographic and
occasionaLly etgmological)
KO-ro-wa-tul-kin, The Cuttle fish, literally, wave tongue.
Be-ra-buk-kan, Sperm whale, which is not eaten, only the
black whale.

INTEREST IN THE HISmRY OF LANGUAGES

When Threlkeld was preparing his vocabulary, scientific interest in classifying

languages had reached new heights in Europe. This was because several scholars
had realised that languages were related to each other, and some could be thought
of as forming families stemming from a common ancestor, or proto-language.
Historical linguistics (the study of the history of languages) was getting underway.
In 1822 Jakob Grimm put forward the hypothesis that German, Sanskrit, Greek,
Latin and German all had their beginning as dialects of a single proto-language,
Indo-European. The hypothesis received widespread publicity among scholars.
Soon attention turned to Australia. Did the Australian Aboriginal languages all
stem from one proto-language? Threlkeld noted that, although people living l00
miles or so apart were not able to understand each other at first glance, yet they
were able to undemtand each other within a short space of time. He argued that
this meant the languages could not be radically different, and tentatively suggested
that Australian languages might all belong to one language family.
Perhaps the most influential spreading of this hypothesis among people
working on Australian languages was by Captain George Grey, later Governor of
South Australia. A few years after Threlkeld produced his A n Australian G k a r n m q
Grey went exploring around the southern part of Western Australia. On his travels
he met Aborigines in different parts and tried to find out what he could about
MAKING DICTIONMIES 129

their languages. In doing so, he realised that much of what had been recorded
on Aboriginal languages was quite unreliable. With the help of a friend he compiled
his material into a book, published in 1840 and followed by a second edition. Like
Threlkeld, Grey was struck by the correspondences among Australian Aboriginal
languages. He noted that the word for water was kawi in Western Australia and
kapi in Adelaide. He argued that this could not be coincidence - there must have
been a language which was ancestor to the languages of southwestern Australia
and the Adelaide language, and which contained a similar word for 'water'.
Grey realised that reliable dictionaries were needed to check these
correspondences. Being appointed Governor of South Australia in 1842 gave him
the opportunity to do something about this, namely to act as patron and encourager
of other people to prepare accurate word-lists and dictionaries. Previous work on
the Adelaide language had been undertaken by people with little knowledge of
the language, starting with the collection of a word-list on a French scientific
expedition (Gaimard 1830-1835). After the establishment of the Adelaide colony
in 1836, communication with Aborigines assumed more importance. Most colonists
appear to have wanted them to learn English. However, there were moves to find
out more about the language of the inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains. The second
Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, William Wyatt, wrote a small account
of the language, manners and customs of the Aborigines, mainly in order to instruct
the population (reprinted as Wyatt, 1879). Word-lists and phrases thought to be
useful for conversing with Aborigines were published in the local newspaper in
1839 (Williams 1839). These word-lists of the Adelaide language all have simple
structures, follow English spelling, and are often hard to interpret.

A DICTIONARY OF THE ADELAIDE LMGUAGE

A much deeper knowledge of the languages in South Australia was
gained by several German missionaries, including Clamor Schurmann and Christian
Teichelmann. Their arrival had been organised by a prominent English non-
conformist Baptist, George Fife Angas, who was concerned about the welfare of
the Aborigines, and who wanted the missionaries to help:
l . to preserve the native language;
2. to give the Aborigines a writing system and translations of the New Testament;
3. to teach the Aborigines to read.
Teichelmann and Schiirmann were encouraged by George Grey and the
then Governor, George Gawler, to publish their material, which they did in 1840
(see Plate 4). In the prefact they gave a number of reasons for publishing it: to
help other Europeans learn the language, so as to be able to talk with Aborigines,
and :
130 JANE SIMPSON

OUTLINES OF A GRAMM-AR

Plate 4: The frontispiece from Teichelmann and Schiirmann's study of the

South Australian language (Teichelmann and Schurmann 1840).
MAKING DICTIONmIES 131

to enliven the hopes of those who wish the christianization

and civilization of their colored fellow-men, showing them
that a race of human beings possessing a language so
regular in its formation and construction as that of the
South Australian natives, cannot be incapable of either; and
to refute premature and unjust detractions concerning the
mental capabilities of the Aborigines of Australia.
A third reason is scientific: 'to render a small contribution or inducement to a
general study of the manners, customs, and origin of these people'.
The book contains about 1,900words, ordered alphabetically, and 160
or so illustrative sentences, both in the vocabulary and in the remainder of the
book. The words are written using a version of Threlkeld's orthography. The
vocabulary contains words in almost every domain - material culture, ritual
practices, kinship, bereavement, naming practices, plant names, animal names,
meteorology, et cetera. The entries are more complex than Threlkeld's, and are
structured as follows (the italics indicate parts of the entry that are italicised to
set them off from the rest of the entry). The entries in Tkichelmann and S c h h a n n
follow this pattern:
Head word (capitalised), p a r t of speech. glossldefinition. example,
translation of example. Comment; includes ethnographic, etymological, new k m
[that is, the word is a term for a new item introduced by the European invaders],
some derived f o m and cross-reference.
Kundo, S. chest; breast. kundo punggondi, to hurt one's
feelings
Kundobakkurta, S. ornamental dots on the chest
Kundomanka, S. ornamental stripes on the chest
Kundomuka, S. the breast of the male
kundopungorendi, vn. to long; linger; languish; to be
uneasy; anxious
Unlike the previous word-lists, parts of speech are recorded for each
word: S. 'substantive' = noun, vn. 'intransitive verb'. Notice also that, while the
first four words are clearly related, there is no attempt to bring out this relatedness
in the structure of the dictionary entry. The fifth word, kundopungorendi, is
probably related, since ku~zdoseems to have two senses - one, the actual chest,
and the other, the seat of emotions. But again, this relationship is not made explicit.
Exactly which words are included in such word-lists is usually dictated
by the interest and circumstances of the dictionary-maker, and in the case of
Aboriginal languages, of the people teaching the dictionary-maker. Dictionaries
produced by people who are not native speakers of a language at the start of their
work tend to focus on concrete things (words for plants, animals, food, artefacts,
topography). Only with a much deeper knowledge of the language do words for
complex emotions, sensations, thought and judgement appear. Howeveq early word-
lists and dictionaries often include words for concepts which were of contemporary
concern. Detailed entries for terms for land ownership sometimes appear,
suggesting that some colonists had scruples about their dispossession of Aboriginal
people. Here is part of an entry from Richehnann and Schurmann's dictionary.
Partgkarra, S. a district or tract of country belonging to an
individual, which he inherits from his father. Ngarraitya
paru aityo partgkarrilu, there is abundance of game in my
country. As each pankarra [sic] has its peculiar name,
many of the owners take that as their proper name, with
t h e addition of the term burka; for instance,
Mulkakiburka ('km O'Shanter), Mullawirrabz~rka(King
John), Kalyoburka, Karkulyaburka, Finahburka &c. [...l
In fact, most dictionaries of Aboriginal languages contain only a small
fraction of the number of words in the languages. This is partly because, until
recently, they have all been prepared by people who were not native speakers
of the languages, and partly because the dictionary-makershave not had the time,
resources and the source material available to some makers of English dictionaries.
In Richelmann and Schurmann's dictionary there is no English to
Adelaide-languageword-list. In fact, most of the early word-lists and dictionaries
tend to be lists of vernacular words with explanations in English, much as if the
dictionary-makersrecorded the words they heard, and then compiled the results
into lists. In terms of communication, it suggests that people wanted to know the
meanings of words in Aboriginal languages that they heard, rather than wanting
to know how to express meanings in that Aboriginal language. But the lack of
such reverse lists must have reduced the usefulness of the vocabulary for colonists
who wanted to use the book to help them learn the language.
Under Grey's auspices, three more dictionaries of South Australian
languages were published (Meyer 1843; Schiirmann 1844;Moorhouse 1846). In 1857
Grey, who by then had moved to South Africa to be Governor of Cape mwn, wrote
to Threlkeld and Richelmam asking for copies of their more recent material. They
both sent him material, and noted that the languages were dying. Threlkeld wrote
'I think a memorial of a language passing out of existence ought to be preserved
for posterity ...'
Richehnann sent a manuscript dictionary of the Adelaide language.
It is a very impressive piece of work which contains about 2,500 words (including
both head words and sub-entries), The words are more fully glossed than in the
MAKING DICTIONARIES 133

1840 dictionary, and (except for concrete terms) usually include at least one
illustrative sentence. It has some unusual words, which indicate his familiarity
with the language and speakers. But perhaps the major innovation in Teichelmann's
manuscript dictionary is the structure of the entry. A good example of this is the
word kundo. In the 1840 dictionary no attempt was made to show the fact that
kundo has several senses, or that words could be derived from it. In the 1857
manuscript, however, three senses are given, and derived forms are listed under
the senses:
Kundo, the chest, whereas ngammi the female breast;
2. anything projecting similar as the chest
3. as the seat of several passions, as
kundo wilta, 'brave, bold; fearless';
kundo punggondi, to dislike, hate; [. ..]
kundo punggorendi, to be concerned about; to be sorry;
kundo punggorendaii ngaityo yungakko, 'I am concerned
about, or long for my elder brother.' [. ..]
The hierarchical structure of this entry, indicated in the manuscript by indenting,
contrasts with the flat structure of entries in the published dictionary.
The head word is capitalised. Senses are numbered. Some derived forms
are still given under the head word entry, but many are given separate, although
indented, sub-entries,with lower-case initial. Sub-entries can in turn have several
senses, and even sub-entries of their own. Comparisons are made with lexemes
that are clearly related. This more complicated structure makes for entries that
capture the complexities of meaning better.
The dictionary has never been published. After the burst of dictionary
publishing encouraged by Grey in the 1840s, interest in publishing dictionaries
declined - such a burst was not seen again until the 1960s. Other large dictionaries
compiled in the nineteenth century were either never published, or not published
until long after their compilation. Such was the fate of James Giinther's grammar
and dictionary of Wiradjuri (Wiradhuri), compiled in 1840 on a mission station
in the Wellington Valley, but not published until 1892. Late in the century, other
German missionaries produced some large dictionaries, perhaps the most impressive
being J.G. Reuther's unpublished manuscript A Diari Dictionary, originally written
in German, and used at the mission at Lakes Kopperamanna and Killalpaninna
in northern South Australia. Again, because it was unpublished, and because it
was not translated into English until late this century, it had little influence on
non-Aboriginal Australians. Some Diyari people learned to read and write their
own language. But, like Awaba, Wiradjuri and the Adelaide language, Diyari has
not survived, and these dictionaries remain important records of the languages.
134 JANE SIMPSON

COMPILATIONS OF WORD-LISTS FROM DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

In the late nineteenth century, attention turned to collecting small word-lists from
many different languages, and comparing them. In 1876 R. Brough Smyth published
The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of
Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania. This contained a variety of word-lists,
some comparative (tables comparing the same concept - for example, 'crow' -
in several Aboriginal languages), some organised by semantic domain. Over thirty
of them were the result of sending lists of English words to people in different
parts of Victoria and asking them to give the corresponding words in the local
Aboriginal languages. It also contains lists of placenames and their meanings,
something that has intrigued Australians for a long time. In 1886 E.M. Curr
published The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing
in Australia, and the Routes by which It Spread Itself over That Continent, which
contained 300 word-lists of approximately 125 words, again the results of sending
out English word-lists to people all over the country and asking for translations.
The lists in Brough Smyth and Curr vary greatly in quality and reliability, but very
often are the most important record we now have of the languages concerned.
While Brough Smyth and Curr were careful to record where the word-
list came from, whether by named group (for example, the Karnathun group) or
place (for example, Colac), the early part of the twentieth century saw the start
of a pernicious practice which has done a great deal to hinder the recognition
of Aboriginal languages. It probably stemmed from the fact that urban Australians
were becoming less aware of Aborigines, and of the differences between Aboriginal
societies. This was the spread of the 'Aboriginal word books'.
In 1930 Justine Kenyon published A n Aboriginal Word Book which
has been reprinted many times since. It consists of lists of meanings for 'Aboriginal
words' and 'Aboriginal placenames'. The words come from many different
languages, but there is no proper recognition of this. Several other books containing
word-lists followed: H.M. Cooper's Australian Aboriginal Words and Their
Meanings, R. Praite and J.C. Iblley's Place Names of South Australia, and perhaps
the most popular of all, A.H. and A.W. Reed's Aboriginal Wordsof Australia. The
problem with these books is that, whether their authors intended this or not, they
give the impression either that there is only one Aboriginal language, or that the
differences between Aboriginal languages are quite unimportant. Furthermore,
because they give no language sources for a particular meaning, it is very hard
to check whether they are right or not. Finally, in instances where the meanings
can be checked, they are often misleading or even wrong.
MAKING DICTIONARIES 135

THE DEMANDS FOR MODERN DICTIONARIES

In the last fifty years, work on dictionaries of Aboriginal languages

has grown enormously. Some excellent large dictionaries have appeared, mostly
because the reading public for dictionaries has changed. In the nineteenth century
the main audience for dictionaries of Aboriginal languages was non-Aboriginal
people, those who wanted to learn the local Aboriginal languages, and those who
were generally interested in Aboriginal languages. But in the last thirty years or
so, bilingual education programs have become more widespread in schools on
Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people are learning to read and write in
their own languages. So there is a need for learner's dictionaries of Aboriginal
languages, both monolingual and bilingual. Goddard's dictionary of
Pitjantjatjara~Yankunytjatjara(Goddard 1987)is an excellent example. There is also
a continuing need for reference dictionaries of Aboriginal languages.
Because the audience for dictionaries of Aboriginal languages has
changed, the need for different kinds of dictionaries is emerging. Adults require
different dictionaries from children. People who have learned to read and write
in English use dictionaries in different ways from people who have never learned
to read and write. People whose first language is an Aboriginal language might
use a monolingual dictionary in preference to a bilingual dictionary. On the other
hand, people whose first language is English could find the English explanations
of a bilingual dictionary quite helpful.
What do they use dictionaries for? Native speakers may use them for
checking the spelling of words, or for learning the basic principles of spelling their
own language, or for finding out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. For people
who are learning to read and write, a dictionary is a useful tool which frees them
from complete dependence on their teacher for checking spelling. Furthermore,
listing normal English words with synonyms helps people literate in English to
increase their English vocabulary.
The language to be included in a dictionary clearly depends on its
intended audience. A learner's dictionary would not include difficult words that
are rarely used. A reference dictionary might include these words, but might
exclude some slang words which people find offensive.
A more intractable problem is often what dialect is to be used in a
dictionary. We face this problem with English dictionaries, since over time the
English language has diverged widely in different places. Similarly, certain
Aboriginal languages have dialects, as Sharpe describes for Bundjalung (chapter 5).
One way of representing these differences is to have different
dictionaries for each dialect. In effect, this is what has happened with the group
136 JANE SIMPSON

of dialects known as the Western Desert Language. Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra,

Pintupi can all be considered dialects of this language, but they each have their
own dictionary. For school use, it is important to keep dialects distinct.
However, it is also useful to see what is common among dialects. And
so another way of handling dialect differences is to have a single dictionary in
which each head word is marked as to which dialect it comes from. By having
a dictionary of many dialects of a language put together, one can see the circulation
of words, and understand shades of meaning and extension of vocabulary. Such
a dictionary would be David Zorc's Y o I ~ Matha
u Dictionary. Perhaps the largest
attempt to cover dialect variation is the on-goingArrernte dictionary project, which
is providing dictionaries for a number of Arandic languages and dialects.
Once the lexicographer has decided what language to record in the
dictionary, the next task is to decide what should be included in the dictionary
entry for each word, and how it should be structured. We have seen how
Tfeichelmann and Schurmann structured entries in their dictionaries. What
information should be included is an interesting question. For instance,
Tfeichelmann and Schurmann include information about the part of speech, thus
that kundo is a noun. This is useful for a learner of a foreign language, who needs
to know what part of speech a word is so that shehe can use it correctly in a
sentence. But it is not generally useful for a native speaker of the language, who
probably already knows how to use the word, or can work out how to use it from
looking at its meaning.
Teichelmann and Schurmann also include ethnographic comments,
such as the fact that people inherit a tract of land from their fathers. This kind
of encyclopaedic information is very useful for learners, whether these are native
speakers or foreign language learners. Including the cultural context in which a
word is used also often helps to give a better understanding of the meaning of
the word.
Kinds of information that are sometimes put into dictionary entries
for Aboriginal languages include local or folk classifications for classes of words.
Thus, ordinary English speakers classify some plants as grasses, others as trees,
shrubs, vegetables, fruit, grains, and so on, while others they find hard to classify
(for example, Venus flytraps). Not surprisingly, Aboriginal people have different
folk classifications of plants, and these may be included in the dictionary entries
for plants (for example, are they seed-bearing? are they edible? what kinds of
implements can one make out of them?). Another area that may be included is
the mythological significance of something, for instance, if fire is an important
dreaming for speakers of a language, they may want this to be included in the
dictionary entry for that word.
MAKING DICTIONARIES 137

The heart of a dictionary entry is the explanation it gives of the

meaning of a word. The dictionary-maker has to decide how the reader will best
grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar word - whether the meaning of the word
should be spelled out as a definition, or synonyms should be used, or pictures
should be given, or illustrative sentences should be used. It seems that different
kinds of words require different types of explanations - it might be more helpful
to show a picture of a wombat than to describe it in words, but it would be hard
to provide an unambiguous picture of an activity like 'winning'.
Dictionary entries can be ordered in several ways. For languages like
English and Aboriginal languages which use the Roman alphabet, a common way
is according to the first symbol (letter) representing the first sound of the word,
or what we customarily call alphabetical order. Of course, there's no need to arrange
the letters in that order. The Russian alphabet, for example, has the letter
representing the sound pronounced [v] as the third letter of its alphabet. But
English-speaking societies, by and large, have chosen to use the ABCDEF
alphabetical ordering, and so have the lexicographers working on Aboriginal
languages (with some exceptions, usually relating to sounds written with two
letters, such as ng).
There are other ways of arranging material. For instance botanists and
gardeners have arranged a special way of classifying plants, and in botany books,
the plants are often listed in the order of that classification, rather than in
alphabetical order.
A thesaurus is a whole dictionary arranged by topics. Two important
decisions that have to be taken before making a thesaurus are, first, what will
be the topics, and second, what order will the topics be arranged in? For instance,
an English thesaurus might have a major topic devoted to architecture, while a
thesaurus of Nunggubuyu (a north coast people) might have a major topic on
dugong. The order and structuring of topics also reflects the importance of
particular concepts in a culture. A society whose main source of meat is dugong,
rather than beef, might give a different priority to dugongs and cattle in a thesaurus
of its language. Several good thesauri of Aboriginal languages have appeared,
including Heath's thesaurus of Nunggubuyu (1982) and Douglas's thesaurus of the
Western Desert Language (1977) (the latter contains excellent illustrations).

CONCLUSION
Much work is being done creating dictionaries of Aboriginal languages, and there
are some major dictionaries in preparation, including a Warlpiri dictionary and
a comparative Arrernte dictionary. The production of dictionaries has been greatly
138 JANE SIMPSON

assisted by computerisation. The availability of texts on computer means that

concordances (lists of words in a text with references to where they occur) can
be created automatically, providing valuable material for compiling dictionary
entries. Putting dictionary entries on to a computer simplifies many of the
lexicographer's tasks. It is much easier to be consistent in structuring entries and
checking cross-references. Furthermore, from one set of entries different
dictionaries can be created semi-automatically. These might be alphabetically
ordered, ordered by topic, abridged, or, in the case of bilingual dictionaries,
reversed. Finally, computerised dictionaries can be useful for creating educational
computer games for children, and for providing people using computers for word
processing with computer spelling checker programs. On the other end of the
continuum, there is growing interest in small vocabularies and picture dictionaries
as useful material for Aboriginal Studies courses.
There is a great need to do more basic recording work on the Aboriginal
languages which have no dictionaries. While no one ever saved a language just
by making a dictionary of it, there is no doubt that, if Aboriginal languages are
to achieve their proper place in the education of children, those children and their
teachers must have access to good comprehensive dictionaries.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Consider the validity of comparing the OED and Teichelmann and Schurmann's
vocabulary, bearing in mind the following points.
a. The OED is a monolingual dictionary, while the other is a bilingual dictionary.
b. The people who prepared the OED were native speakers of English, whereas
the two people who wrote down the vocabulary of the Adelaide language were
native speakers of German.
c. In the nineteenth century, when these dictionaries were compiled, English had
been a written language for over five centuries, whereas the Adelaide language
had not been written down before the European invasion in 1836.
d. It took more than forty-four years to complete and publish the OED. By contrast,
the two authors of the Adelaide language vocabulary arrived in Adelaide in 1838
to start learning the language, and eighteen months later published their
vocabulary.
e. In 1838 there were probably not more than a few hundred speakers of the
Adelaide language.
2. In this chapter, partial explanations of words like 'vocabulary', 'glossary' are
given together with an explanation of what they meant in the language from which
English borrowed the term. The source of a word is called its etymology. Many
MAKING DICTIONARIES 139

dictionaries contain etymologies for words (indeed, etymological dictionaries are

devoted to providing etymologies). Why do dictionaries include etymologies? Do
they help you understand the meaning of words? Can you know the meaning of
a word without knowing its etymology? Look at the list of words below, (taken
from a learner's dictionary (Goddard 1987, 62), and provide etymologies for them.
kalatji glass, mirror
lapaturi toilet
mutuka car
nipa-nipa scissors
tjiila prison, gaol, the lockup
tjapila shovel
tina lunch
tiinta 1. tent, canopy on vehicle. 2. piece of canvas,
tarpaulin
walypala white man
waya 1. wire 2. wire handle on billy 3. power cord 4.
things made of wire, for example, a cooking-grill
And now some harder ones:
kaliki canvas
laimi (noun) plaster
makat i rifle
miita spouse
tiki (on) credit
tjaintjimila~icash a cheque
3. In the nine years between 1838 and 1846 six dictionaries of Aboriginal languages
were published. In 1857 Threlkeld wrote to George Grey that he had hoped to
publish his updated dictionary by subscription, but Australians showed a lack of
interest in science: 'there is but little Encouragement for such things in this Colony'.
In 1971 Geoffrey O'Grady (O'Grady 1971) could only think of four dictionaries of
Aboriginal languages published in the twentieth century. Think of reasons why
people lost interest in publishing dictionaries. Track down O'Grady's article and
compare the reasons with his suggestions.
4. You are presented with a dictionary of 'European'. On page one you see the
following lists of words:
abercoc apricot
alamo poplar tree
aller to go
antworten to answer
amba it's all up!
arktos bear
alcatraz pelican
140 JANE SIMPSON

By dint of asking your Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Greek and
Portuguese friends, you find out that these words come from their languages. What
uses could you make of such a book?
5. Look at the following entry from the Warlpiri dictionary (provided by Mary
Laughren).
JAALJAAL(PA) [Noun or Preverb] (Yuendumu dialect)
1. feeling, hunch, premonition
Ngaju karna jaaljaal-jarrimi nyiyakurra. Marda kapulu kurdu
ngajunyangu pakarni. I have a feeling about something. Perhaps
they are going to hit m y son. Kari! Nyiyakurra karna jaaljaal-jam
miyalu nyampuju? Ngajunyangukurra kajanyanukum? Jungajuku
ngajunyangukurralparna jaaljaal-jarrija manjurruju. Jungajuku
wantija miyalu-purdadi. Oh, why do I have this feeling in m y
stomach? Is i t because of m y son? It was because of m y son that
I had this twitching feeling. He fell down on his stomach.
When used with the AUative case
2. ( Y w n d u m u and Lajamanu dialects) have an urge, desire (to do
something), want, feel (like), have a yen for.
Jaaljaal-jarrimi, ngulaji yangka kujaka yapa kiyikiyi-jarri manu
jalajala-jarrimi nyiyarlanguku majuku marda ngurrjuku marda -
ngurrju-maninjaku - yangka nyanungu yangka yapa - wati
marda, karnta marda, kurdu marda. Jaaljaal-jarrimi is when a
person feels like or gets the urge to do something, either something
bad or something good - to make something -just that person
himself - either a m a n or a woman or a child. Jaaljaal-jarrimi
karna janyungukupurda. Ifeel like some tobacco. [Alma Granites
Nungarrayi, Y27.9.881
Wara! Janyunguku karna jaaljaal-jarrimi. Oh Ireally feel like some
tobacco. [Jean Napanangka Brown Y 19881
When used with the Dative case
Work out the different kinds of information contained in the entry,
how they are coded (for example, by typeface), and speculate as to how readers
could use this information. [NOTE: 'AUative' is the case of motion towards,
expressed by the suffix -kurra in the examples. It is roughly equivalent to the
English prepositions 'into' and 'onto'. 'Dative' is the case of the recipient, or the
thing desired, of the person benefiting from something expressed by the suffixes
-ku and -kupurda in the examples. It is roughly equivalent to the English
prepositions 'to' and 'for".
MAKING DICTIONARIES 141

6. Provide a dictionary entry for the English word 'urge' in 'have an urge to'.
Compare your explanation with one given in a large dictionary, such as the Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary or the Macquarie Dictionary.
7. Suppose the sounds of an Aboriginal language are written as follows: a i u
p t ty k m n ng rn n y l rl ly r rr W y (all the double letters represent a single
sound, just as the sh sound in 'shop' represents a single sound). How would you
order these sounds? Do you foresee any problems with your ordering?
8. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of organising a word list
alphabetically or by topics. You might consider points such as:
is it a learner's dictionary?
if it's a learner's dictionary, what's the first language of the learners?
what uses is the dictionary intended to have? Learning about a particular topic?
Searching for synonyms? Checking the spelling of a word? Looking up the meaning
of an unfamiliar word?
9. 'A picture is worth a thousand words'. Discuss the truth of this statement with
respect to sets of words - for example, compare words for things, such as saucers,
bowls and plates, with words for emotions, such as anger, love and hope.

REFERENCES
Austin, P.
1991 'Australian Lexicography'. In F.J. Hausmann, 0. Reichmann, H.E.
Wiegand (eds), Encyclopaedia of Lexicography, Walter de Gruyter,
Berlin, 2638-41.
Capell, A.
1971 History of Research in Australian and Tasmanian Languages. In T.A.
Sebeok (ed), Current Trends in Linguistics 8, Mouton, The Hague,
661-720.
Cooper, H.M.
1952 Australian Aboriginal Wordsand Their Meanings, South Australian
Museum, Adelaide.
Curr, E.M.
1886-87 The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of
Landing in Australia, and the Routes by Which It Spread Itself over
That Continent, 4 vols, J. Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne.
Dixon, R.M.W., W.S. Ramson a n d M. T h o m a s
1990 Australian Aboriginal Words in English: Their Origin and Meaning,
Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
142 JANE SIMPSON

Douglas, W.
1977 Illustrated Topical Dictionary of the Western Desert Language:
Warburton Ranges Dialect, Western Australia, Australian Institute
of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
Gaimard
1830-
1835 Vocabulaire de la Langue des Habitants de Golfe Saint-Vincent. In
Voyage de Dhcouverte de I'Astrolabe 1826-7-8-9 sous le
Commandement de M.J. Dumont d'Urville, v01 1Philologie, J. Tkstu,
Paris, 6-8.
Goddard, C.
1987 A Basic P i t j a n ~ a ~ a r a / Y a n k ~ ~ n y t j ato
~ aEnglish
ra Dictionary,
Institute for Aboriginal Development, Alice Springs, Northern
Territory.
Grey, G.
1845 'On the Languages of Australia', Being an Extract of a Dispatch from
Captain G. Grey, Governor of South Australia, to Lord Stanley.
Communicated by his Lordship, Journal of the Royal Geographical
Society 15, 365-367.
Giinther, J.
1892 Grammar and Vocabulary of the Aboriginal Dialect Called the
Wirradhuri. In J. Fraser (ed), A n Australian Language, as Spoken
by the Awabakal [L. E. Threlkeld], Appendix D, 56-120.
Heath, J.
1982 Nunggubuyu Dictionary, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
Canberra.
Kendon, A.
1988 Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Serniotic and
Communicative Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Kenyon, J.
1982 Aboriginal Word Book, Lothian, Melbourne.
Kilham, C. et al.
1986 Dictionary and Source Book of the Wik-Mungkan Language,
Summer Institute of Linguistics, Darwin.
Meyer, H.A.E.
1843 Vocabularyof the Language Spoken by the Aborigines of the Southern
and Eastern Portions of the Settled Districts of South Australia, J.
Alien, Adelaide.
Moorhouse, M.
1846 A Vocabulary and Outline of the Grammatical Structure of the
Murray River Language, A. Murray, Adelaide.
MAKING DICTIONARIES 143

G.N.
Lexicographical Research in Aboriginal Australia. In T.A. Sebeok (ed),
Current Trends in Linguistics 8, Mouton, The Hague, 779-803.
Praite, R. and J.C. Tolley
1970 Place Names of South Australia, Rigby, Adelaide.
Reed, A.H. and A.W.
1965 Aboriginal Words of Australia, A.H. and A.W. Reed Pty Ltd, Sydney.
Reuther, J.G.
1981 The Diari, microfiche ed. Translated from the German by P.A.
Scherer, Bnunda. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
Canberra.
Sandefur, J. and J. Sandefur
1979 Beginnings of a Ngukurr-Bamyili Creole Dictionary, Summer
Institute of Linguistics, Darwin.
Schurmann, C.W.
1844 A Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language, Adelaide.
Simpson, J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner
1989 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd e d , Oxford University
PressIClarendon Press, OxfordINew York, 20 vols.
Smyth, R.B.
1876 The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the
Natives of other Pa.rts of Australia and Jhsmania, 2 vols, John Currey,
O'Neil, Melbourne.
Strehlow, C.F.T.
n.d. Aranda-Loritja-English Dictionary, Translated from the German
by P.A. Scherer. 223-page typescript held at Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies.

Teichelmann, C.G. and C.W. Schurmann

1840 Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary, and Phraseology, of the
Aboriginal Language of South Australia, Spoken by the Natives in
and for some Distance around Adelaide, Published by the authors,
at the native location, Adelaide.
Threlkeld, L.E.
1834 A n Australian Grammar, Comprehending the Principles and
Natural Rules of the Language, as Spoken by the Aborigines in the
Vicinity of Hunter's River, Lake Macquarie, &c. New South Wales,
Stephens and Stokes, Sydney.

Williams, W.
1840-
[l8391 A Vocabulary of the Languages of the Aborigines of the Adelaide
District, and other Friendly Tribes, of the Province of South Australia,
144 JANE SIMPSON

published privately by A. McDougall, Bundle St, Adelaide, and then

republished in South Australian Colonist, Adelaide, 297-98.

Wyatt, W.
1879 Vocabulary of the Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribes, with a Few
Words of t h a t of Rapid Bay. In J.D. Woods (ed), The Native Tribes of
South Australia, (no publisher) Adelaide, 157-82.
Zorc, R.D.
1986 Yolngu-Matha Dictionary, School of Australian Linguistics, Darwin
Institute of Technology, Batchelor, NT.
 CHAPTER

LOSING AND GAINING A

LANGUAGE: THE STORY OF KRIOL
IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY

John Harris

PIDGINS: ANSWERS TO A PROBLEM

I n the past few hundred years European colonialism has affected many language
communities. Disruption of the lives of whole societies has drastically
affected normal language transmission from one generation to the next. In extreme
cases, indigenous languages have disappeared and new languages arisen. Troy
(chapter 3) talks of the origins of a pidgin in early colonial New South Wales. Pidgins
have often been viewed with suspicion by those who did not speak them,
particularly if they were an elite or politically dominant class while the speakers
of the new languages were the colonised, dispossessed or lower classes. Although
such prejudice has often been due to elitism or even racism, it has also sometimes
been due to ignorance. Many otherwise well-meaning people have simply failed
to understand the difference between a restricted pidgin language and a full creole
language, nor have they understood why they arise in the first place.
A pidgin is a contact language, used only for limited purposes between
groups of people having no common language. Generations of films, novels and
comics have produced a derogatory stereotype of pidgins in the minds of many
people. This 'me Tarzan, you Jane' kind of language is widely thought to be the
result of primitive thought processes, or mental deficiency, or baby talk. This
stereotype is wrong. Pidgins are the creation of skilled people faced with a sudden
need to communicate with other people who do not speak the same language.
There have been pidgins as long as people from different language
communities have been thrust into sudden contact. The period of European
colonial expansion, however, brought people into contact much more frequently
and much more widely than had happened before.
In the earliest contacts, communication is often restricted to such
interactions as trading, where a detailed exchange of ideas is not required. A small
vocabulary is sufficient, drawn almost exclusively from the language of the
dominant group. The grammar of pidgin is 'simplified' in the sense that it is less
complex and less flexible than the structures of any of the languages involved in
the contact. It is not, however, merely a jargon: that is, a pidgin has and obeys
its own rules.
It is important to realise that simplification of language is not
necessarily a backward step. Consider these three sentences: 'I go to Sydney today';
146 JOHN HARRIS

'I went to Sydney yesterday'; 'I will go to Sydney tomorrow'. In an imaginary pidgin,
these sentences could become: I go Sydney today; I go Sydney yesterday; I go
Sydney tomorrow. These sentences are perfectly comprehensible. The meaning
is still clear, although there is what some people call a 'loss of grammar'.
A pidgin is nobody's primary language. Both parties privately speak
their own full languages. Chinese Pidgin English, for example, which arose in the
eighteenth century, was used initially between British traders and Chinese
merchants. It was a restricted language, able to cope with simple trade negotiations.
Chinese Pidgin English was not the primary language of the Chinese or the British.
The Chinese went home and spoke Cantonese while the British went home and
spoke English.
Some pidgins remain in use as pidgins for hundreds of years. Others
may be only short-lived and then disappear completely. On the other hand, some
pidgins expand to fulfil new communicative demands.

CREOLES: RESPONSES TO A NEED

Many pidgins have undergone immense, rapid expansion to become the primary
languages of new communities. These new languages are no longer pidgins but
are termed 'creoles', a word which originally referred to almost anything which
developed in colonial situations. The term is now used by linguists to refer only
to new languages which have arisen by the rapid expansion of a pidgin
('creolisation').
Many colonial contexts in which pidgins developed were situations of
extreme social disruption in which communities arose consisting of people who
did not share a common language. Plantation slavery was a typical context. Slave
traders normally supplied slaves from different language backgrounds to prevent
them from grouping in large numbers. Their only common language was the
plantation pidgin. The slave communities, and particularly their children, had an
urgent need to communicate with each other on a wide range of subjects but no
language in which to do it. Their response was to create languages of their own,
using the local pidgin as the basic raw material, but expanding it to cope with
all communicative needs. The resulting languages were creoles.
A creole is a full language, while a pidgin is a restricted special-purpose
language. It can be argued that there is no real difference, linguistically, between
creoles and other normal languages. The view that a creole is in some way inferior
is a delusion, made possible only because, unlike older languages, creoles may still
be able to be compared with the languages of which they are believed to be
corruptions. Many of the grammatical simplifications for which creole languages
LOSING AND GAINING A LANGUAGE 147

are denigrated, such as loss of inflection, are in fact true of modern English when
it is compared to its ancestor languages. Changes in English, however, either took
a long time or are perceived as having happened long ago, whereas the
simplifications of language which occur in pidginisation, and the subsequent
preservation of those simplifications in a creole, may all take place within one
or two generations.

KRIOL: THE STORY OF A NE W CREOLE

Kriol is a unique Australian creole. Its history well illustrates the relationship
between a creole and its pidgin ancestor, and demonstrates that creolisation occurs
as a result of rapid social change and the demand for a primary language in a newly
emerged community (Harris 1986).
After four unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to invade the Northern
Territory between 1824 and 1866, permanent settlement was achieved in Darwin
in 1870. Over the next thirty years, there was an influx of English-speakingpeople.
Some came to establish the cattle industry and others came to the gold rushes,
where they were outnumbered by the Chinese. There was considerable interaction
between Chinese, European and Aboriginal people, particularly in the vicinity of
European settlements, such as the emerging townships, the mining camps, and
the cattle stations. None of these groups could understand each other's language,
so a direct consequence of their need to communicate was the emergence of
pidginised forms of English. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these
pidgins had converged into one widely understood lingua franca, Northern
Territory Pidgin English. At this point, Northern Territory Pidgin English was still
a pidgin. It was still a contact language, still used for restricted purposes only,
still nobody's primary language; that is, it had not yet creolised. All its speakers
spoke other full languages at home.
The first place in the Northern Territory where the pidgin was
expanded to become the primary language of a new community was the Roper
River Mission (now Ngukurr), where creolisation began to occur shortly after 1908.
The invasion of the Roper River region by Europeans had commenced with the
construction of the overland telegraph in the early 1870s. Huge cattle drives were
then undertaken as the pastoral frontier moved from Queensland into the Northern
Territory. Cattle stations were established in the 1870s and 1880s and a small
township emerged at Roper Bar, the shallow crossing used by European drovers,
miners, settlers, cattle thieves and anyone else who had to cross the Roper River
travelling north or south.
148 JOHN HARRIS

These were violent years and a great deal of aggression was directed
at Aboriginal people in the region. As one of the early missionaries, R.D. Joynt,
wrote in 1918, hundreds had been 'shot down like game'. The massacre of Aboriginal
people in a w a r of extermination' was widespread and continuous throughout
the whole of the pastoral frontier. Initially, the battle was not entirely one-sided.
The Aboriginal people of the Roper River region gained themselves a reputation
for fierce and concerted resistance to the European invasion of their lands.
Any hypothetical chance, however, that Aboriginal people may have
been able to maintain control over the future of themselves and their society was
drastically ended at the turn of the century when a London-based cattle company
(The Eastern and African Cold Storage Company) acquired massive tracts of
unleased or abandoned land to carve out a pastoral empire from the Roper River
north into Arnhem Land. Purchasing all the cattle stations along the western Roper
River, they began moving cattle eastward. The company had no intention of
allowing Aboriginal resistance to hinder this huge project. Determined to
exterminate them, they employed gangs of up to fourteen men to hunt out all
inhabitants of the region and shoot them on sight. With the police and other
authorities turning a blind eye, the hunting gangs of the cattle company staged
an unprecedented, systematic campaign of extermination against the Roper River
people. They almost succeeded.
This near annihilation of the Aboriginal people of the region led to
the first factor necessary for the genesis of a creole: sudden and drastic social
change and the accompanying severe disruption of normal language transmission.
The second requirement for the genesis of a creole is a new community. This was
made possible by an Anglican mission station.
Challenged by the plight of Aboriginal people, the Anglican Church
determined to establish a mission on the Roper River itself. Commenced in 1908,
the mission was perceived as a haven of refuge by the scattered people of the
region. By 1909 some 200 Aboriginal people gathered there. They were the
remnants of the Mara, Wandarang, Alawa, Ngalakan and Ngandi people, together
with the easternmost Mangarayi people and the southernmost members of the
Rembarrnga and Nunggubuyu. As Barnabas Roberts, an Alawa man who came to
the mission as a young boy, once said: 'If the missionaries hadn't come, my tribe
would have been all shot down'.
The eight groups spoke separate and distinct languages. As is typical
of Aboriginal people, the adults were multilingual. Although they had not lived
permanently in such close proximity before, they had met regularly for ceremonial
and other purposes. Over the course of a lifetime, these people had always become
fluent speakers of each other's languages. The children, however, were not yet
LOSING AND GAINING A LANGUAGE 149

multilingual. Approximately seventy children attended school at the mission, each

one of them forced into contact with other children whose languages they had
not yet had time to learn. They were the new community, they needed a primary
language, and they needed it immediately.
Whereas their parents could communicate with other adults by
speaking Alawa or Mara or whatever, the children could not. What they had in
common was the English pidgin used between Aboriginal and European people,
together with the English they were hearing in school. With this limited input,
it was this younger generation who, in the course of their lifetime, created the
creole, manipulating the linguistic resources available to them to create a language
which catered for all their communicative needs. This language is now called Kriol.
As one local person, Ralph Dingul, puts it:
La Ngukurr melabat garrim eitbala langgus. Wen naja traib
wandim tok la dis traib, dei tok mijalb garrim Kriol. Jad
impotan langgus im Kriol. Olabat gan sabi bla wanim olabat
toktok.
(At Ngukurr, we have eight languages. When another tribe
wants to talk to this tribe, they talk to each other in Kriol.
The important language is Kriol. They all can understand
whatever they want to discuss.)
The relationship of the missionaries to the emergence of Kriol is
complex. The Aboriginal people accepted the missionaries. They chose the mission
site for them and they recognised that the missionaries came as friends, not
enemies. They gathered at the mission and there formed the new community for
which a new primary language became necessary. Certainly, the mission provided
a location for this new community, the location where the demand for a creole
would arise; but the mission did not create the creole. The movement of pidgin
English towards a creole at other locations - in the Kimberleys, around the cattle
stations and at Barunga during World War 11, for example - indicates that the
process of creolisation would have eventually taken place, provided that Aboriginal
people had survived in the region without the mission to protect them. Thus,
although the effect of the mission was to expedite the rise of Kriol, it was not
the primary cause. Indeed, the truth is that Kriol arose despite the efforts of the
missionaries to prevent it.
It is not easy to judge accurately the impact of the missionaries'
attitudes to language. Initially, they intended to learn a local language but
discovered to their dismay that there were at least eight. They could have chosen
one of these - perhaps the language of the actual mission site - but it is still
unlikely that this would have prevented the emergence of Kriol.
150 JOHN HARRIS

What the missionaries did was conclude that Standard English was the
only choice for the official language of the mission. They therefore tried to
discourage what was starting to be called 'Roper Pidgin', and were surprised at
their inability to do so. Young people became bilingual, speaking Kriol among
themselves and English to the missionaries. Informally, many missionaries also
attempted to speak Kriol as a communicative necessity.
The missionaries could not, of course, have known what was
happening. Even the scholarly linguistic world did not recognise Kriol until the
1970s. Prior to that, Kriol and its antecedent pidgins were considered 'ridiculous
gibberish' (Strehlow 1947, xix), 'broken jargon' (Wurm 1963, 4) and 'lingual
bastardisation' (Baker 1966,316). In this context, the missionaries could not have
deduced that a new and viable language was coming into existence. We could hardly
expect that the missionaries would have had more linguistic understanding than
contemporary linguists. The missionaries discouraged the use of Kriol, banning
it in school and especially avoiding it in religious contexts.
Despite the efforts of the missionaries, Kriol was born, and it continued
to develop and mature. It is now the language of a new community. For many people
it is now both mother tongue and primary language. Kriol is now formally described
(Sandefur 1979, 1986) and is beginning to acquire its own distinctive literature.

THE KRIOL BIBLE TRANSLATION

Old prejudices die hard. There are still people today who do not consider Kriol
to be a 'proper' language. Furthermore, Kriol-speaking Aboriginal people
themselves have held a low view of their language. This is a worldwide
phenomenon in creole-speaking communities. Creoles have not normally arisen
as the languages of the rich or powerful. Those who speak creoles have endured
generations of abuse of themselves and their languages. It is little wonder that
they have grown ashamed of their speech.
There is, however, a worldwide trend for creole-speakingpeople to gain
a new sense of self-esteem as they break away from the colonial oppression of
the past. The languages which have become their own are invariably part of their
emerging identity and gain new respect. In many parts of the world, the new pride
that creole-speaking communities have in their languages has been initiated by
the translation and publication of something significant and substantial.
This has almost always been the Bible. Whatever one's religious views,
the significance of the Bible as a substantial book with powerful symbolic value
cannot be denied. Furthermore, the translation of a book with so much deep
philosophical and abstract material lays to rest the criticism that creoles are
inadequate languages which can only express simple ideas.
LOSING AND GAINING A LANGUAGE 151

The Kriol Bible translation program illustrates this particularly well.

Against opposition from some linguists, some missionaries, some educational
administrators and even from some older Aboriginal people who believed that Kriol
was inferior, a translation program has been in progress since 1973. This Bible
translation has played a crucial role in raising the status of Kriol in the eyes of
its speakers. When the first small book of selections, Holi Baibul, was published
in 1985, people at Ngukurr, Barunga, Darwin and in the Kimberleys wore T-shirts
depicting the region where Kriol is spoken (Kriol Kantri) and a Bible. The slogan
read: Dubala brom God (Both from God).
Certainly, as is often the case in translation, narrative passages were
the easiest to deal with. Yet, even there, the differences between English and Kriol
are evident. Here is Luke 2:8, the verse which opens the story of the shepherds
visiting the infant Jesus.
English Revised Standard Version:
And in that region there were shepherds out in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.
Kriol Holi Baibul:
Orait, sambala stakmen deya langa dat Kantri deibin
maindimbat ola nenigout langa pedik naitaim.
Alright, some-fellow stockmen there belonging that
country they-were minding all-the sheep belonging paddock
nighttime'.
W a i t replaces 'and' as the normal Kriol commencement of a narrative. The cattle
industry, so important in Kriol Kantri, gives stakmen (stockmen) as the Kriol word
for anyone who minds animals. The first sheep-like animals in the Roper region
were goats - hence nenigout (nanny goat).
Here are two longer passages containing complex theological ideas from
Ephesians 1: 5-10, where St Paul discusses God's plan for humankind.
Revised Standard Version
He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ,
according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his
glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the
Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the
forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his
grace which he lavished upon us, for he has made known
to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will,
according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a
plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him,
things in heaven and things on earth.
152 JOHN HARRIS

Holi Baibul
Longtaim God bin jinggabat blanga meigim wi san blanga
im, dumaji imbin laigim wi, en bambai after imbin meigim
wi im san wen imbin joinimap wi langa Jisas Krais, dumaji
imbin gudbinji blanga dum lagijat, en imbin meigim im ron
plen. Wal wi garra preisim God en gibit im teingks, dumaji
imbin abum detkain filing blanga wi, en imbin shoum wi
det filing blanga im wen imbin gibit wi ola enijing friwan
thru Jisas det brabliwan san blanga im, dumaji wen Jisas
bin weistim im blad, imbin meigim wi fri, en God bin
larramgo wi fri brom 01 detlot nogudbala ting weya wibin
oldei dumbat. Trubala God im brabli kainbala, en brabliwei
imbin shoum wi im kainbala. Wal God im brabli sabibala
du, en imbin dum wanim imbin wandim, en imbin shoum
wi det plen blanga im weya imbin jinggabat blanga dum
garram Jisas Krais. Nobodi bin sabi det plen basdam, bat
we sabi na. Wi sabi wen im rait taim, God garra joinimap
ebrijing weya imbin meigim langa dis we1 en langa hebin,
en Jisas na garra sidan boswan blanga olabat.
It has been the translators' experience that the task of expressing these
concepts in Kriol has made the English more comprehensible to them. Here are
a few examples of wording from the above passage:
(God) destined us...to be his sons
Longtaim God binjinggabat blanga m i g i m wi san blanga
im
(For a) longtime God has thought about making us sons
of his'
In him we have redemption through his blood
Wen Jisas bin weistim im blad, imbin meigim we fri
'When Jesus shed his blood, he made us free'
He has made known to us...the mystery of his will
Imbin shown wi det plen blanga im... Nobodi bin sabi del
plan basdam, bat wi sabi na
'He showed us that plan of his... Nobody understood that
plan before, but we understand now'.

CONCLUSION
Kriol is now a full language. Over 20,000 people can speak Kriol. For about half
of these, Kriol is their mother tongue. Like all languages, Kriol is capable of
expressing all that its speakers want to say. Certainly, Kriol speakers on the Bible
LOSING AND GAINING A LANGUAGE 153

translation team found themselves saying things that had never been said before
in Kriol. But there was nothing, finally, that they could not say.
Living languages do change, and one of the major reasons for change
is the need to express new concepts. Kriol has shown itself well able to do that.
As time progresses, Kriol speakers will find the need to express and communicate
yet newer ideas. That Kriol can do this is proof that it is a full language.
It is possible that some of the changes in Kriol will move it closer to
English, because Kriol speakers also speak English as a second or third language.
However, the more Kriol comes t o symbolise their distinctiveness, the more Kriol
speakers will value and preserve it.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. English: If I have no money, I won't come
Samoan Pidgin English: No mani, no kam.
What are the differences between the two sentences? Can one sentence be shown
to be inferior to the other? Does one sentence convey more meaning than the
other?
2. In a language derived from English the sentence Me no si m a n yu tok means
'I haven't seen the man you are talking about'. Can you tell whether or not the
language is a pidgin or a creole? Explain why or why not.
3. Imagine a situation in which an Australian army unit was based in a
Berovian-speaking country to oversee a cease-fire. Under what conditions could
a pidgin develop there? What language would it be based upon? What could cause
this new pidgin to become a creole?
4. In 1582 Richard Mulcaster pleaded for English to be accepted as the language
of education and scholarship in England, rather than Latin. English, he said, was:
'our own tung.. .bearing the ioyfull title of our libertie and fredom, the Latin tung
remembering vs of our thraldom and bondage'.
What do you think may have been the objections to English? What was the force
of Mulcaster's argument?

REFERENCES
Baker, S.J.
1966 The Australian Language, Currawong Publishers, Sydney.
Harris, J.W.
1986 Northern Territory Pidgins and the Origin of Kriol, Pacific
Linguistics '2-89, Canberra.
154 JOHN HARRIS

Joynt, R.D.
1918 Ten Years among Aborigines, H . Hearne and CO, Melbourne.
Sandefur, J.R.
1979 A n Australia KrioZ in the Northern Territory: A Description of
Ngukurr-Bamyili Dialects, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Darwin.
1986 Kriol of North Australia: A Language Coming of Age, Summer
Institute of Linguistics, Darwin.
Strehlow, T.G.H.
1947 Aranda Traditions, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Wurm, S.A.
1963 Some Remarks on the Role of Language in the Assimilation of
Australian Aborigines, Pacific Linguistics A-l, Canberra.
 CHAPTER

11 KRIOL: THE CREATION OF A

WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND
A TOOL OF COLONISATION

Mari Rhydwen

WHAT IS KRIOL?

K riol is the word 'creole' written in the orthography of the variety of creole
spoken in Barunga (formerly Bamyili) and Ngukurr (Roper River). Harris
has described the origins of Kriol and the use of the language in Bible translation
(chapter 10).
Amongst Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, the term 'Kriol'
is normally used to refer only to the speech of people from Barunga or Ngukurr,
although some use the term more widely and in Western Australia one creole is
sometimes called 'Fitzroy Valley'. The question that arises is whether there is one
language, widely spoken throughout northern Australia, that may be referred to
as 'Kriol', or whether there are varieties of creole, of which Kriol is one example.
Some linguists argue that there is a single language throughout the area - the
name is in fact irrelevant, but call it Kriol. On the other hand, it is well-known
that there are language varieties that, although very similar linguistically, are
known as different languages for political or other ideological reasons - for
example, Serbian and Croatian. In such cases, however, people tend to assert that
they are 'really' the same language, thus making a distinction between two kinds
of facts, 'scientific facts' and 'social facts'. Because of the dominant scientific
paradigm in Western intellectual ideology, facts have status, and real facts have
more status than social facts, since it is easier to verify scientific facts. What I
call into question is the pre-eminence of scientific arguments in a situation where
sociopolitical factors are so evidently significant.
To return to the question of Kriol, many people in the Daly River area
do not think that they speak Kriol, even though they acknowledge that they speak
a mutually intelligible variety to Barunga Kriol. I could argue for this as a social
fact; I could even appeal to a number of 'real' facts to show that there are
differences between the two varieties of language. At this point, however, I want
to establish that to engage in justifying arguments about the status of Kriol, by
drawing on established scientific theory, is to accept a particular view of knowledge
and science. To do this, without question, in a cross-cultural situation where the
dominant, colonising culture accepts this theory of knowledge, but the colonised
group does not, is to be implicated in, at best, colonisation of the mind, at worst,
genocide.
156 MARI RHYDWEN

There is no simple way through the intellectual labyrinth encountered

in the course of doing linguistic work, or indeed any kind of work, in an area so
beset by social and political problems far beyond the control of any individual.
The reality is that after 200 years of colonisation, no Aboriginal community remains
untouched by the influence of that invasion, whether it be in economic, social
(including educational) or religious ways. At this stage, the only option which I
find appropriate is to approach the question by acknowledging the issues involved
- by making explicit the cultural values, pressures and expectations arising from
my own cultural environment and by articulating our understanding of other
relevant perspectives. I shall be content when a first-language speaker of
Kriol/creole revises my arguments.
As mentioned earlier, speakers of creole in northern Australia generally
recognise only a few varieties as Kriol. On one level this is insignificant: it does
not matter what people call the language they speak and the reality of the language
remains unchanged by the terminology used by linguists or others, to describe it.
On the other level, it does matter, for the work of linguists is significant in
determining educational, and hence social, policy in the Northern Territory.

THE CURRENT USES OF KRIOL LITERACY

In 1972 the government of Australia declared its support for bilingual education
programs on the grounds that, in Prime Minister Whitlam's words, 'tribal cultures
should be preserved, not crushed' (Dixon 1980, 91). One of the places that a
bilingual program was established was Barunga, where the program was in Kriol.
Since that time the situation has changed: the Northern Territory government now
takes responsibility for education in the area, there have been general shifts in
government policy, and there is now a different perspective on bilingual education.
There is currently far more emphasis on the efficacy of vernacular literacy in
promoting English literacy than on it as a means of ensuring cultural survival.
There is, of course, within both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intellectual circles,
debate about whether vernacular literacy in fact promotes or destroys oral culture;
but, aside from that debate, there is also the question of whether vernacular
literacy is seen as a tool of assimilation or of liberation.
In a situation where an ancestral language is used in a bilingual
program, the justification is that this both aids English literacy acquisition and
helps to foster the indigenous language. Many such situations are complicated by
the fact that more than one ancestral language is used within the community:
the school, by choosing to use one rather than another, alters the status of
languages, and by implication, of social groups within the community. Nevertheless,
KRIOL 157

given that the process of schooling cannot but have a homogenising effect, the
fact that one or more Aboriginal languages may be used within school programs
is at least a concession to the special needs of the community. In many cases the
school is viewed as a means of facilitating 'both ways education'. In the words
of Bakamana Gayak Yunupingu:
The school is a place which can do a great deal to help
children become successful in language use, but it will work
best at this when the community is consulted about how
language is to be used. This is because Yolngu draw on the
philosophies that will help to sustain sensitive components
of Yolngu knowledge through the idea of 'Both Ways'
education, to live in, maintain and be proud to live in a
Bi-cultural and Bilingual society. (1987, 134)

Whatever the tension between these two ways, there is at least an

understanding that cultural maintenance is a significant factor. The situation in
Kriol-speaking areas is, however, somewhat different. There is currently, and has
only ever been, an official bilingual Kriol program in one school, namely Barunga.
At Ngukurr, Kriol is used only orally although there is some informal Kriol literacy.
Both these communities comprise groups of speakers of different ancestral
languages, many of whom no longer live in their traditional homelands and who
live in these communities because of severe social disruption by European settlers.
There are substantial differences between the situation of Kriol speakers and that
of speakers of other Aboriginal languages. Kriol speakers never identify themselves
as Kriol people. They refer to themselves by the name of their ancestral language,
even if they do not speak it. Moreover, ancestral languages are often more widely
used a t places like Barunga than many Europeans realise. People have learned
to hide some aspects of their life.
Now, it is apparent that the use of creole as a first language or as a
lingua franca, is widespread throughout much of the school-age population in the
Northern "lerritory. The ideology of bilingual education, of biliteracy, is that it allows
'both ways' education, the 'both ways' being Western and Aboriginal. Yet, many
children speak a language that gives them access to neither. Children who are
creole speakers are, with a few exceptions, treated as though they speak English,
albeit 'badly', and there is no provision for them to be taught English as a second
language. At the same time, children who speak creole often live in communities
where the establishment or continuation of a bilingual program in an ancestral
language has been refused on the grounds that the children do not have such a
language as their first language. These children not only miss out on adequate
access to English, since they are not taught it in ways appropriate to second-
158 MARI RHYDWEN

language learners, but, in most cases, they miss out on instruction in Aboriginal
culture, which is generally assumed to have disappeared.
At Barunga, where there is officially a Kriol bilingual program, this
was not the case. It was acknowledged that the children did not arrive at school
as English speakers, and ancestral languages were not totally ignored. The inclusion
of Kriol, both as a medium and an object of study, gave recognition to the
relationship between it and English, while the significance of the ancestral
languages, whose names are still used to identify the affiliations of the children
within the community, was still acknowledged in the education system. Since the
mid 1980s the bilingual program at Barunga has proved vulnerable to changes in
school personnel and controversy about the status of Kriol has adversely affected
the program there.

KRIOL AT NGUKURR
Ngukurr (previously Roper River) is, like Barunga, a community where it is widely
acknowledged that Kriol is spoken. Unlike Barunga, Ngukurr School does not have
an officialbilingual program, although Kriol is used informally in the school. There
appear to be two reasons for this. One is that written Kriol literacy has been used
in church-based contexts and the community is generally aware of Kriol and of
Kriol literacy. Secondly, almost the entire school staff at Ngukurr is Aboriginal.
This is a result of a policy developed by the Department of Education and the
community to rectify a situation where there was low school attendance. Hence,
most of the teaching staff are themselves Kriol speakers. Although there is little
Kriol literacy, Kriol is used extensively orally in the school.
A previous school principal (now dead and therefore, in accordance
with local custom, not to be named here) indicated that she wanted a bilingual
program but that she wanted the local community to have control over its own
literature production and not rely on material produced at Barunga. This issue
of local control of literature is central in the debate about literacy in creole-speaking
areas. Although it is not a problem for Barunga and Ngukurr speakers to
comprehend each others dialects, the differences in pronunciation and a few items
of vocabulary are significant markers of identity. The standardising effects of
literacy are known, but resisted, much as American spelling and usage may be
resisted in Britain and Australia. But, given the importance of maintaining these
distinctions, there is no reason why schools in different communities should not
be able to produce their own literature, especially since recent developments in
computer technology make desktop publishing a real possibility.
KRIOL 159

CREOLE AT NAUIYU NAMBIYU

At Nauiyu Nambiyu (Daly River) the ancestral languages most widely used are
Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngan'giwumirri, together referred to as Ngan'gityemerri.
In addition, older people use a pidgin, known locally as 'Pidgin English', which
is mutually intelligible with a creole spoken by younger people and known locally
as Ngan'giwatyfala. (Ngan'gi is the word for 'language', hence Ngan'giwatgfala
is 'Europeans' language'.) The crucial distinction between the pidgin and the creole
rests on whether it is the first language of the speaker. In the case of all the older
speakers whom I recorded, it is an ancestral language that is their first language
both in a chronologicalsense and in the sense that it is the language they use most.
They can be heard addressing young people in ancestral languages, even though
the young people tend to respond in creole. In the case of people under thirty
years of age, creole is the language they use habitually, although they may have
some knowledge of their ancestral languages. In addition, they speak some English
as well, so that the creole is, for them, not primarily a contact language with English
speakers but the language of intra-community communication. For pidgin speakers
the pidgin may serve this function but is also the sole means of communication
with English speakers.
There is one group who do not fit neatly into either of these categories
and this is the group between the ages of about thirty and forty. This was the
first generation to attend the Mission School, which was established in the 1950s.
This is the generation whose parents were speakers of ancestral languages, and
who spoke those languages with their parents as young children, but who lived
in dormitories at the school where English was the only language officially spoken.
This is the generation who, although they can often speak an ancestral language
to some extent, can be heard using creole to each other and to their children.
They are presumably the first generation of local creole-speakers.
Kriol speakers and Ngan'giwatyfala speakers generally insist that they
do not speak the same language, and it appears to be a matter of significance for
both groups to maintain this position. One woman who had family connections
with both the Daly River area and with a Kriol-speaking area did speak of creole
in the two areas as kinds of Kriol, but she also drew my attention to the differences
between the varieties. This was also the case with a Nauiyu Nambiyu woman who
was interested in writing creole. It would seem that people who were able to discuss
the differences and similarities between Kriol and Ngan'giwatyfala were those who
had already acknowledged that Ngan'giwatyfala is widely spoken and has some
similarities to Kriol, as opposed to those who were still, in some way, denying its
existence. Among the differences were the fact that Daly people say mifala and
160 MAR1 RHYDWEN

not mibala (we); they say liliwan for lilwan (small); and they say wulumen not
olmen (old man). In addition, when ancestral language words are used in
Ngan'giwatyfala, they are different from those used in Kriol-speaking areas. Thus,
for people familiar with both varieties, the differences appeared to be either
phonological or lexical, with lexical differences mainly restricted to ancestral
language words. These are the same kinds of difference that are invoked when
one asks about the differences between Barunga and Roper Kriol.

NGAN'GI WATYFALA ORTEOGRAPHY

At this stage it is too early to develop a Ngan'giwatyfala orthography, partly because

not enough of the language has been recorded and analysed, but also because of
the delicate relationship between members of the community and anyone who
wishes to discuss creole. There are, of course, linguistic and pedagogical reasons
for aiming a t an orthography that corresponds as nearly as possible to the sound
system of the language. It is also desirable to use symbols which are available on
typewriters and so on, and which are not too different from those used in other
languages. But beyond factors such as these, it is important that an orthography
is acceptable to those who will use it - the speakers of the languages themselves.
This is particularly significant where a language is being written for the first time
by those who are not members of the local community. Thus, it is essential that
speakers of a language cooperate in the design of an orthography. At Nauiyu
Nambiyu there is considerable antagonism towards creole and reluctance to
participate in activities that might promote it, such as writing it down. Hence,
it is difficult to obtain the kinds of input from the community that would be
necessary to create an acceptable orthography.
It is thus important to open up debate about linguistic matters with
members of the community, to identify the problems as they appear to an outsider
and to offer suggestions about possible courses of action. It cannot be denied that
children in the community are speaking creole and that this must have some impact
on their progress in the school system in which they are obliged to participate.
Not only community members, but those people who are in the community as
school teachers, need to be involved in the process of deciding what the
implications of creole are for the education of the children.
Furthermore, Ngan'giwatyfala does not exist in isolation. In fact, all
over the Northern Territory and Western Australia people speak varieties of creole
or non-standard English that are related to each other in some way. It is not only
at Nauiyu Nambiyu that children in a community are speaking a creole which is
not being acknowledged formally by the school or community and that the
KRIOL 161

children's access to the skills which the community hopes they will gain from a
school education is probably being hampered by the fact that they speak a creole.
It is worth noting here that where written Kriol is already in use, it
is not necessarily used in all possible situations. At Barunga, Kriol has been used
in the bilingual program there for thirteen years, but its use is mainly confined
to the school. It is only amongst members of the Christian community that Kriol
literacy is used outside the school and only in that context that there is intra-
community communication through the medium of Kriol literacy. Within Barunga,
English is generally used as the medium for written communication, such as notices
in the shop or on the Council notice board. In such a small community there is
relatively little need for written communication and no tradition of using it among
community members.
So far as communication with the wider community is concerned,
English is, and is likely to remain, the medium of communication. The only likely
use for written Kriol is for the dissemination of information about government
projects and suchlike, but even this seems improbable in view of the increasing
use of television and video to perform this kind of function. At Ngukurr, a team
of educators from the Northern Territory Power and Water Authority conducted
a campaign to teach people about conservation of resources, but they did this
through personal contact and videos, not through writing. The widespread
ownership of televisions and video equipment, in contrast to the lack of writing
materials in Aboriginal communities, suggests that this situation may continue.
Indeed, in the wider Australian community it is through the electronic media that
information is most rapidly and effectively disseminated to the general public.
Thus it seems reasonable to assume that if written creole is ever used
in Nauiyu Nambiyu, its use too may be restricted to educational purposes within
the community. In view of this it is worth examining the possibility of devising
an orthography specifically for use in that community, or in others that use the
same dialect. There are two possibilities, one is using the Ngan'gityemerri
orthography, or a modified version of it, the other is to have a completely separate
orthography based neither on Ngan'gityemerri nor on Kriol. These two possibilities
will be considered in turn.

DESIGNING AN ORTHOGRAPHY
One obvious way to write Ngan'giwatyfala would be to use the local orthography
of Ngan'gityemerri. But the sounds of the two languages are in fact rather different.
Like most Australian languages, Ngan'gityemerri has no fricative sounds such as
[S], [z] and [h]. It is necessary to represent these sounds in Ngan'giwatyfala and
162 MART RHYDWEN

a similar need to extend Ngan'gityemerri symbols arises within vowels. Once such
additions or changes are made- and reflected in a substantial proportion of the
words of the language - it is no longer the case that one is using the local
orthography. Any supposed advantage of similarity or compatibility between two
spelling systems is undermined.
A second possibility would be to use the Kriol orthography already
in use at Barunga and Ngukurr. Some minor modifications would still be needed
- for example, the addition of the symbol f to cater for Ngan'giwatyfala
pronunciations such as mifala 'we' rather than Kriol mibala - but a strong
argument for using the existing Kriol orthography is that it has been developed
already and is relatively widely known. It is used not only in scholarly works about
Kriol, but there are also many books written in the language for use in schools
and a Kriol version of the Bible. If it were used for writing Ngan'giwatyfala and
other varieties of creole that have not yet been written, there could ultimately
be a very extensive range of communities that would share a writing system. It
would be possible to produce written texts that could be used in creole-speaking
areas all over the Northern Territory and there would be the potential for the
dissemination of written information to large numbers of people.
On the other hand, there are problems that are not so easily overcome
as minor modifications to the use of symbols. It is clear that varieties of creole
are spoken differently. Moreover, the differences between varieties are important
to speakers. Kevin Fbdgers, principal of the Ngukurr school and a Kriol speaker,
has explained why Ngukurr people do not want Kriol material for their school
to be produced at Barunga:

It is important to write the dialect of Kriol that is spoken

in Ngukurr and not that spoken in Barunga, since the
sounds and some vocabulary of the Ngukurr dialect is
related to the local traditional languages and not to the
traditional languages spoken at Barunga. (1988)

Thus, even within the areas where people acknowledge that they all
speak Kriol, there are problems about using the written form. Kriol orthography
allows dialectal variation to be manifested so that, for example, the word for 'go',
can be written go or gu according to local pronunciation. But this means that
written material produced by the speaker of one dialect is regarded as unsuitable
teaching material in areas where another dialect is spoken. There is a strong feeling
within communities that their identity is reflected in the variety that they use.
Thus, there is hostility towards standardising written Kriol, towards creating a
written form that is no-one's dialect but that everyone could read. Fbdgers writes:
KRIOL 163

The Barunga school books were influenced by non-

Aboriginal teacher linguists who seem to have developed
a 'School Kriol' dialect, which is more than simply the
difference between oral and written Kriol modes.
The test of any such orthography will of course be whether it is
acceptable to speakers. At present no orthography is acceptable. Moreover, very
few people are familiar with the Ngan'gityemerri orthography, making it difficult
to consult community members about the extent to which they would like
Ngan'giwatyfala orthography to be based upon it. It seems likely that the evolution
of an orthography for Ngan'giwatyfala will depend to some extent on whether
the community develops a strong interest in writing Ngan'gityemerri. If they do,
then using that orthography as a basis for creole orthography may be acceptable.
If not, then it might be more appropriate to use the Kriol orthography, if indeed
Ngan'giwatyfala is ever written by its speakers. Ngan'giwatyfala speakers may
continue to regard the variety as a purely oral mode of communication so that
the question of how to write it will remain forever merely a matter of debate among
linguists.

THE FUTURE OF CREOLE LITERACY

The issues in creole literacy include both practical linguistic questions relating
to the precise form of the orthography and more delicate questions relating to
notions of linguistic and cultural identity. The most pressing issue, however, is what
linguists and educators should or can do to facilitate language education that is
appropriate to the needs of Aboriginal people in communities where creole is
spoken. With hindsight, it is easy to identify the mistakes in apparently well-meant
efforts. At a local level, consultation and liaison with local Aboriginal people with
an interest in education are possible and desirable. More important, in my opinion,
is a willingness to share information freely. To empower Aboriginal people in ways
that allow them to challenge and debate such issues, they need to have free access
to the information with which non-Aboriginal people work. In order to do this
they need access to the education system that informs the debate. Yet, when non-
Aboriginal people make decisions about language that seem to them necessary
to facilitate that access, they may be guilty of cultural imperialism. It is only by
making explicit, at every stage, our cultural assumptions; by being prepared to
learn about and respect those of others; and, most importantly, by not judging
those of others by the criteria intrinsic to our own, that we can hope to maintain
the integrity of our culture and that of anyone with whom we are in contact.
164 MARI RHYDWEN

A TEXT IN THREE ORTHOGRAPHIES

To illustrate the issues raised in this chapter, the same story is given below in three
different orthographies. The story is a spoken narrative, not originally written
down. But the three transcriptions of it will show the differences mentioned above.
A translation to English is included at the end. (Only the second transcription is
punctuated because only it has adopted a punctuation system.)

Ngan'gityemerri orthography
(Names are left in English spelling. Words that break normal rules of
Ngan'gityemerri orthography are marked with an asterisk.)
wan satidey * muning mi Kiti en U * nadawan Molly Patricia
Mercia Dominica mela bin askim* gida* bla* gu anting langa
ada* said* langa wut* dat * pleis* na im kul* Dangerous
Gap init Dangerous Gap we1 mela bin askim* bla* Patricia
asbin* imin drupimuf * mela la rud* en mela bin wuk frum*
la dat* kuna* rait* bak la dat* lilwan krik* wen dat wen
dey bin syutim wan ulmen gat gan mela bin dringgimbat*
wata* de na we1 mela bin stat* klaimapbat* untup* la il
en ay bin stat* lukranbat* blanga* we dem* pukupany wen
dey* bin digimbat mela bin fanydimbat sam* fresywan*
uwul* we dey * bin digimbat we1 ay bin gu ratybek* la wan
kuna* en ay bin fanydim* syugubeg* langa entpit * en imin
isiwan bla* tegimat tufala bin afum lilwan eks* en Patricia
imin biyany imin sidanabat* la wan lilwan ruk* en im from*
samting* imin telim yu luk andanit* en imin luk dat
pukupany* we1 imin raty* andanit* we1 mela kudan
tekimetim tyepeka end* Patricia imin telim rni wan
pukupany * im iya ay kan tekimbat yu ken alpum mi en imin
gifit mi dat ukwaya ay bin tray* tekimbat* nating* we1
frum* de mela bin mufimbat wan ruk* we1 mi ay bin duwim
dat* wek tekimbat* dat* ruk* afta* ay bin pulimat dat*
pukupany * bat imin unli* lil bebiwan we1 mela bin gudaun*
daun* na we1 mela ai bin testi* bla* wata* bat nu wata*
bin de wal mela bin klaimap* ran* an ran* ai bin get disi
mela bin gu en mela bin afum wan dug* im neim* Sopi we1
ai bin telim Patricia en Marita bla* gudan lukranabat wata*
dey bin fanydim liliwan watahol* bat imin hotwan* dat*
wata* ay kudun drinkim* we1 mela bin go ratyaran* dat*
dug* imin tayid* na frum* klaimapbat* la il imin afta*
sidan* la wanim busyisy wal mi ay bin anggri* bla* taka
mela bin tekim nu* taka de la dat il ay bin lafta* katimbat*
merrepen ay bin itimbat* datan* na ay bin itimbat*
itimbat* tu en ay bin megim dem* adamob* katimbat mu*
KRIOL 165

tufala bin anggri* frum* de mela bin dringgimbat* wata*

imin sey * faif * U* klok* na mela bin wuk bek mela wukbek
we Andi bin drupimuf * mela mela luk dat * redwan* ka imin
de na weitweitbat* bla* mela en mela bin kambek kemp
den
As can be seen almost thirty per cent of words are problematic, and some of those
are problematic in several ways. It seems to be clear that the orthography of
Ngan'gityemerri is, therefore, unsuitable as a medium for writing Ngan'giwatyfala.

Kriol orthography
(Some minor modifications have been made to usual Kriol.)
Wan Satidei moning mi Kitty e n hu nathawan? Molly,
Patricia, Mercia, Dominica mela bin askim githa bla gu
anting langa atha said langa, wat that pleis na im kal?
(Dangerous Gap intit?) Dangerous Gap. We1 mela bin askim
bla Patricia asbin. Imin tekim mela. Imin dropimof mela
la rod. En mela bin wok from la thad kona rait bak la thad
liliwan krik wen dat wen dei bin shutim wan ulmen deya
gat gan. Mela bin dringgimbat wada deya na. We1 mela bin
stat klaimapbat ontop la il en ai bin stat lukranabat blanga
weya that pokupain wen thei bin digimbat. Mela bin
faindimbat sam freshwan owul we thei bin digimbat. We1
ai bin gu raitbek la wan kona en ai bin faindim shugabeg
langa entpit en imin isiwan bla tegimaut mela bin abum
liliwan eks. En Patricia imin biyain. Imin sidanabat la wan
lilwan rok en im from samthing imin telim yu luk andanith
en imin luk thad pokupain. Wal imin rait andanith we1 mela
kudun tekimautim tjepeka. En Patricia imin telim mi 'Wan
pokupain im iya ai kaan tekimbat yu kan alpum mi?' En
imin gibit mi thad ukwaiya. Ai bin trai teikimaut, nathing.
We1 from theya mela bin mubimbat wan rok we1 mi ai bin
duing that wek tekimatbat that rok afta ai bin pulimat that
pokupain bat imin onli lil beibiwan. Wal mela bin gudaun
daun na. We1 mela, ai bin testi bla wada. Bat no wada bin
deya wal mela bin klaimap ran en ran en ai bin get disi.
Mela bin gu en mela bin abum wan dog im neim Sopi. We1
ai bin telim Patricia en Marita bla gudaun lukraunabaut
wada. Dei bin faindim lilwan wadahol bat imin hotwan that
wada. Ai kudan drinkim. Wal mela bin go raitaran with thad
dog imin tayid na bla klaimapbat thad il imin afta sidaun
la wanim bushish. Wal mi ai bin anggri bla taka. Mela bin
tekim no taka deya la that il. Ai bin lafta kadimbat
Merrepen. Ai bin idimbat tharran na. (Idimbat Merrepen?)
Mm. (Yu kan idim?) Ai bin idimbat, idimbat tu, en ai bin
166 MARI RHYDWEN

mekim that nathamob katimbat mo. Tufala bin anggri tu.

From theya mela bin dringgimbat wada. Imin sei faif o klok
na mela bin wok bek. Mela wokbek weya Andy imin
dropimof mela. Mela luk that redwan ka imin deya na
weitweit bla mela. En mela bin kambek kemp den.

Local orthography
wan satidey moning mi Kiti en hu nadawan Molly Patricia
Mercia Dominica mela bin askim gida bla gu anting langa
ada sayd langa wot dat pleys na im kol Dangerous Gap init
Dangerous Gap we1 mela bin askim bla Patricia asbin imin
drupimuf mela la rod en mela bin wok from la dat kona
raty bak la dat lilwan krik wen dat wen dey bin syutim wan
ulmen gat gan mela bin dringgimbat wata d e na we1 mela
bin stat klaymapbat ontop la il e n ay bin stat lukranbat
blanga we dem pukupany wen dey bin digimbat mela bin
fanydimbat sam fresywan uwul we dey bin digimbat we1
ay bin gu ratybek la wan kona e n ay bin fanydim syugubeg
langa entpit en imin isiwan bla tegimat tufala bin afum
lilwan eks en Patricia imin biyany imin sidanabat la wan
lilwan rok en im from samthing imin telim yu luk andanit
en imin luk dat pukupany we1 imin raty andanit we1 mela
kudan tekimetim tyepeka end Patricia imin telim mi wan
pukupany irn iya ay kan tekimbat yu ken alpum mi en imin
gifit mi dat ukwaya ay bin tray tekimbat nating we1 from
de mela bin mufimbat wan rok we1 mi ay bin duwim dat
wek tekimbat dat rok afta ay bin pulimat dat pukupany
bat imin onli lil bebiwan we1 mela bin gudaun daun na we1
mela ai bin testi bla wata bat no wata bin de wal mela bin
klaimap ran en ran ai bin get disi mela bin gu en mela bin
afum wan dog im neym Sopi we1 ai bin telim Patricia en
Marita bla gudan lukranabat wata dey bin fanydim liliwan
watahol bat imin hotwan dat wata ay kudun drinkim we1
mela bin go ratyaran dat dog imin tayid na from klaimapbat
la il imin afta sidan la wanim busyisy wal mi ay bin anggri
bla taka mela bin tekim no taka de la dat il ay bin lafta
katimbat merrepen ay bin itimbat datan na ay bin itimbat
itimbat tu en ay bin megim dem adamob katimbat mo tufala
bin anggri from de mela bin dringgimbat wata imin sey faif
o klok na mela bin wuk bek mela wukbek we Andi bin
dropimof mela mela luk dat redwan ka imin de na
weytweytbat bla mela en mela bin kambek kemp den
KRIOL 167

English translation
One Saturday morning me Kitty and who else, Molly,
Patricia, Mercia and Dominica, we all decided amongst
ourselves that we would go hunting together over the other
side [of the river] at, what's that place called, Dangerous
Gap isn't it? Dangerous Gap. Well we asked Patricia's
husband to take us and he dropped us off on the road and
we walked from the corner all the way back to the little
creek where they shot an old man, with a gun. We had a
drink of water there then we started climbing to the top
of the hill and looking around for where the echidnas had
been digging. We found some recent holes where they had
been digging. Well I went all the way back t o one corner
and I found some honey in an antbed and it was easy to
get out. Two of them had a little axe and Patricia was
further back. She'd been sitting down on a little rock and
something told her to look under the rock and she saw an
echidna. It was right underneath. Well we couldn't reach
it apparently. And Patricia told me, 'There's an echidna
here. I can't get it out. Can you help me?' She gave me the
hook wire. I tried to take it out but I couldn't. Well after
that we were moving the rock, well I was doing the work,
moving the rock, and then I pulled out the echidna but it
was only a baby. Well we went all the way down then, well
we, I, wanted a drink of water and there wasn't any water
there. We climbed up again round and round and I got dizzy.
We went on and we had a dog with us, called Sopi. Well
I told Patricia and Marita to go down and look for water.
They found a little waterhole but the water was hot and
I couldn't drink it. Well we went all over the place with
that dog. It was tired after climbing the hill and it had to
rest in the whatchamacallit, the bushes. Well, as for me,
I was hungry. We hadn't taken any food there and I had
to cut some sand palm nuts. I was eating them, I was eating
two of them and I made the others cut more. The other
two were hungry too. After that we were drinking water,
it was about five o'clock then. We walked back. We walked
back to where Andy had dropped us off. We saw that red
car. He was waiting for us and we returned t o the camp
then.
168 MAPI RHYDWEN

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Consider the ways in which your own spoken dialect and written forms of
English reflect your cultural identity. As a group, identify differences or similarities
among your dialects and see if you can find correlations with cultural differences
or similarities.
2. It has been suggested (Wijk 1977) that the spelling of English should be
regularised. An example of the system he proposes is included here:
It shood be noted, on the wun hand, that certen speech
sounds a r reprezented by several fonic units, and, on the
uther, that certen fonic units ar uzed to denote more than
wun sound. This may seem sumwhot strainge at first.
What is your reaction to his suggestion? Does the fact that Wijk is not a native
English speaker affect your feelings about his suggestion?
3. As mentioned in the preceding article, many people, both Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal, consider creole a threat to both access to English and maintenance
of indigenous languages. In view of limited funding for language and education
programs, discuss your priorities were you to be responsible for language policy
in this area.

REFERENCES
Dixon, R.M.W.
1980 The Languages of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Fbdgers, K.
1988 Critical Review of Language Survey by John Sandefur, unpublished
MS.
Wijk, A.
1977 Regularized English Regularized Inglish. A Proposalfor a n Effective
Solution of the Reading Problem i n the English-Speaking Countries,
Almqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm.
Yunupingu, B.
1986-87 Language-Use in Yirrkala. In D-BATE: Aboriginal Teachers Write
about Their Cammunity Languages, Deakin University and Batchelor
College of Aboriginal Teacher Education, NT.
 CHAPTER

12 THE LANGUAGE OF OPPRESSION:

THE BOLDEN CASE,
VICTORIA 1845

Michael Christie

STICKS AND STONES WILL BREAK MY BONES.. .

I n 1841 in an area we know today as the Western District of Victoria, two
Aborigines were killed while crossing the run of the squatter, George Sandford
Bolden. The Aborigines were husband and wife. The man was shot at close range,
while the woman was horsewhipped so severely that she died from the beating.
Their son escaped and reported the incident to the Protector for Aborigines in
that district, Charles Sievewright. Sievewright, who doubled as the local justice
of peace, took down Bolden's explanation of what had happened and eventually
managed to have Bolden stand trial for the killings. The criminal trial briefs are
still extant and among them is Bolden's original deposition made in Sievewright's
presence.
It is a brief handwritten deposition devoid of detail. In it Bolden stated
that, while out mustering with his men, he came upon three Aborigines whom
he tried to drive away with stockwhips. The Aboriginal man attempted to pull
him from his horse, so he shot him in the stomach. He fired once again as the
man took refuge in a waterhole and this second shot was fatal. The woman died
from wounds to the head.
Bolden's language is bland and matter-of-fact. It is the language of a
man intent on not saying too much, for fear of incriminating himself. The action
and movement that must have characterised that brief, tragic encounter are
missing. In his deposition Bolden says impassively that 'the second shot was fatal'
and that the woman 'died from her wounds'. The young boy who witnessed the
killing of his parents and reported it to Sievewright is simply one of 'three
Aborigines' (Bolden 1841). The sex and age of the group is not mentioned nor is
the fact that they were a family, crossing what was to them traditional tribal land.
There are many ways of describing what happened on that day. A
dispassionate coroner, interested only in the events as an explanation of the cause
of death, might have described it as follows: 'Two otherwise healthy human beings
died, the female because of subdural bleeding caused by heavy blows to the head,
the male because of the loss of blood and dysfunction of vital organs caused by
gunshot wounds to the body'. As in Bolden'k deposition there would be a heavy
use of the passive voice.
170 MICHAEL CHRISTIE

In my own opening I tried to state the facts of the case as unemotively

as possible. The woman was hit with a stockwhip. The correct verb used for this
action is 'to horsewhip'. But the phrase stands out simply because the action of
whipping a woman to death is horrifying no matter how it is described. Bolden's
phrase 'died from head wounds' is as understated as one can get. To the surprised
victims the 'incident' of the record book was sudden, unprovoked, cold-blooded
murder. To their tribespeople it was an act of war.
How would the boy himself have described this event that so abruptly
left him orphaned? His images and the words would certainly be far more graphic
than those of Bolden, so anxious to play down what he and other squatters
considered a routine 'clearing operation'. At some point, as the family walked across
the flats they must have heard, above the sounds of the bush, a sound unlike that
of wallabies on the move, a sound that was rhythmic and heavy, and that grew
louder as it approached. When Bolden and his men reached the group on their
horses, there must have been shouts, running feet, the wheeling of horses, the
crack of whips.
The woman did not simply die. She was hit again and again, perhaps
with the handle of the whips as well as the leather hide itself. There was blood
and horse sweat and cries of pain. There was also a hopeless uneven struggle as
the black man tried to protect himself and his family, as he tugged on a whip in
the hope of dislodging at least one of his assailants. There was the sound of
gunshots, the acrid smell of gunsmoke, a bloody trail to a waterhole, two black
bodies in the grass.
The boy was never allowed to give his version of what happened to
the court. If he had, we might have some inkling of his terror on that day. Perhaps
he hid, listening in horror to the dull thud of the gunshots. Perhaps it was he who
first found his mother once the horsemen had ridden away, her head crushed like
the heads of the goannas they may have hunted that day. The documents give
no hint of the hurt or the despair or the sense of loss of a boy who, in a single
afternoon on the river flats, saw both his parents die.
Instead, we have the journalese of a newspaper report, in which we
are told that Judge Willis advised the jury to acquit the defendant ('the brother
of a near and respected neighbour of mine') because there is 'a clear and distinct
right to turn any person off their property, that may come on it for the purpose
of aggression or not' (Port Phillip Gazette 1841). Bolden escaped without censure
and his reputation among white settlers was enhanced among his peers because
of 'his firm handling' of the blacks.
The incident was certainly no more horrific than many others that
occurred on the Australian frontier. A few years earlier, in June 1838, twenty-
THE LANGUAGE OF OPPRESSION 171

eight Aborigines, mainly women and children, had been shot and mutilated and
their bodies burned on a run near Myall Creek, in the Liverpool Plains area
(Australian 1841). In another incident, in February 1842, at Muston's Creek in
the Western District, eight whites surrounded a ti-tree clump where two Aboriginal
families were sleeping and fired at them indiscriminately. Two men and a woman
escaped with gunshot wounds but a child and three women, one of whom was
pregnant, were killed. The massacre, according to testimony gathered by
Sievewright, was premeditated and carried out to relieve the boredom of a summer
evening (Port Phillip Gazette 1843).

DESCRIBING VIOLENCE
Until the 1970s such incidents were rarely alluded to in Australian history books
and, when they were, they were often glossed over or depicted from the whites'
point of view. Our knowledge of the frontier comes mainly from the written record,
which is, almost without exception, couched in English. There is some variation
in style and perspective among official records and newspapers, which make up
the largest proportion of the documents. There is even more diversity in the private
letters and journals of individuals. But what is remarkable is the consistency of
the language used to describe frontier conflict between whites and blacks. The
Aborigines' actions are usually termed 'attacks, incursions, atrocities, outrages,
crimes, murders, or depredations', whereas the activities of the squatters and
border police are referred to as 'incidents, clearing operations, self defence, punitive
expeditions or police actions'. Judge Willis talked about 'turning off' trespassers.
Ironically, in the 'flash language' of the convicts, to 'turn off' meant to kill. There
are a few diaries (see below) where the authors avoid euphemism and some of
the evidence given at contemporary Royal Commissions is often unequivocal and
frank regarding the violent treatment of the Aborigines.
Since 1970 revisionist historians have done a great deal to balance our
picture of what occurred during the colonisation of Australia. But there is still
a need to challenge historical descriptions, to investigate the language used, and
to ask who said what, when and why. This is particularly important when the
only records remaining are official documents, or when commentary on events
is in the form of newspaper reports. For example, in the incidents mentioned above,
white men were tried for the deaths of Aborigines but the words of the Aborigines
(albeit translated) were never heard, because Aboriginal evidence was inadmissible
in court. Although they were theoretically British subjects (because the Crown
had claimed Australia and all within it as its own), the Aborigines were excluded
as witnesses, because, it was argued, they were heathens and as such could not
take the oath by swearing on the Bible.
172 MICHAEL CHRISTIE

As a result our knowledge of events is based on descriptions that have

been sanitised or wrapped in the cotton wool of euphemism. At the Bolden trial
Sievewright put the boy's case to the court: but, according to him, the evidence
was ridiculed. He himself, as a public servant, was obliged to concur with Judge
Willis's ruling that the blacks had been trespassing because of the legal fiction
that Australia had been 'unoccupied and waste' at the time of discovery and,
therefore, all land belonged to the Crown by right of discovery. The Crown
abrogated the right to dispose of it as it wished, subdividing land into town
allotments and leasing land in the interior to the graziers. A ruling, such as that
of Judge Willis, set legal precedents for dealing with Aboriginal 'trespassers' and
a squatter's lease became, in effect, a licence to kill.
I have focused on the Bolden case because in this incident the squatter
himself is brought t o trial. In most cases the men involved in frontier atrocities
were pastoral workers who were either ex-convicts or ticket-of-leave men. It was
important for those who took pride in British culture to see incidents such as Myall
Creek (where the ferocity of the killing was hard to deny) as the work of the
'debased and criminal element in society' and unrepresentative of the British type.
It is true that shepherds, hutkeepers, bark gatherers, and bullockies, some of whom
had themselves been brutalised by the British penal code, were often responsible
for offences against the blacks, but they by no means had a monopoly on racial
violence.
Bolden was not an ex-convict. Like many squatters he came from a
good family and considered himself to be a gentleman. If we can believe the private
journals of squatters, written during the frontier period, it would seem that Bolden
was not unrepresentative of his class. Henry Meyrick, in describing the activities
of his fellow squatters in Gippsland, wrote that Aboriginal 'men, women and
children were shot whenever they can be met with' and that although he himself
would 'not ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom
here whenever smoke is seen', he did admit that 'if I caught a black actually killing
my sheep I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog' (Meyrick
30 April 1846).
Neil Black, another gentleman squatter, deliberately took up a run that
had already been 'cleared' of blacks by a former overseer, Frederick laylor. Black
noted in his diary that he had let another do the job because 'I could not stand
the thought of murdering them, and to tell the truth I believe it is impossible to
take up a new run without doing so, at least the chances are 50 to 1' (Black 1839-41,
43).
What is surprising in Black's diary is his frankness. He refers to the
killing of blacks as murder. But it is also important to note that even with Meyrick
THE M G T J A G E OF OPPRESSION 173

and Black, language and action are intertwined. Meyrick, in his diary entry, calls
the Aborigines 'men, women and children' when they are sitting by their camp
fires doing no harm to him, but likens them to wild dogs when they attack his
sheep. In the first instance he would never fire on them a t random, in the latter
he would shoot them remorselessly.
If, as Black claimed, 'two thirds of the squatters does not care a single
straw about taking the life of natives', we need to ask what it was that enabled
well-educated gentlemen to act in such a manner? Why was it, then, that the
second sons of respectable British landholders, who made up a good proportion
of the squatters, could kill with such little consideration for the law and such little
remorse for the loss of human life? How do we explain their ability to shoot or
poison whole groups of Aborigines in their push for new or richer pasture land?
And how could they still hold their head high in a society that they claimed
represented the acme of civilisation?
The answer is very complicated but part of the explanation is that
Aborigines were so often spoken of as less than human that it became possible
even for educated people to begin to believe such rhetoric and to treat them as
such. The oppression of the Aborigines began with words.

POPULAR THEORISING ABOUT RACE

European philosophers such as Aquinas held that all creatures were arranged in
an ascending order from the simplest organism, through primates and humans
to spiritual beings. In the seventeenth century philosophers began to apply this
concept of 'the Great Chain of Being' to human society. Some concentrated on
differences in languages, others on the physical variety among people of different
races. Most of them produced schemes for what they called the 'progressive stages
of human development'. Had they avoided value judgements, the schemes might
have served as a useful categorisation of world economic systems but instead, by
ranking those systems in order of excellence and using terms such as 'savagery',
these philosophers reinforced the cultural chauvinism of Europeans at the expense
of other races, most notably the black races. Their so-called scale of civilisation
placed the Europeans first and the blacks last.
As more and more explorers and navigators had contact with the great
south land, references to Australian Aborigines increased. Dampier's scathing
description of Aborigines began to appear in more intellectual works as evidence
of the degrees and differences among human beings. His phrase that the Aborigines
'.setting aside the Human Shape.. .differ little from brutes' is repeated again and
again, both in philosophical works and in the books of the early nineteenth century
ethnologists (Dampier 1927, 312).
174 MICHAEL CHRISTIE

Ethnology, or the study of human groups, blossomed in the early 1800s.

One reason was the fierce debate that raged over the rights and wrongs of slavery.
The new 'science' of ethnology was employed by both sides in a particularly nasty
war of words. The debate did nothing to advance the image of Aboriginal people
in the minds of the colonisers, whether they were gentlemen squatters or ex-
convicts. Indeed, the slavery debate added a whole new set of racist words and
concepts to an already rich literature. In order to justify slavery, proponents drew
support from the writings of those philosophers who developed the idea of 'the
Great Chain of Being', and argued that slavery benefited the savages because it
replaced a life of idleness with a life of sustained work, the basis of progress and
civilisation. Others quoted the Bible, saying that the life of a slave under a Christian
master was preferable to the life of a 'debased and demoralized savage'. Besides,
hadn't Noah cursed the sons of Ham and said that they would serve the sons of
Japheth (Genesis 9:18-27)? Conveniently, the black races were held to be
descended from Ham and the white races from Japheth. The opponents appealed
to Christian charity, claiming that it was precisely because the blacks were inferior
that they deserved to be evangelised rather than exploited.
The debate polarised the two main theories of human origin:
monogenesis and polygenesis. In simple terms, monogenesists argued that the
various races were all descendants of Adam and Eve; but some peoples had
degenerated from an original, common excellence. The polygenesists, on the other
hand, insisted that such differences could not have emerged in the 6,000 years
since creation and that the various races were the result of separate creative acts.
The more radical polygenesists claimed that the races not only were created
separate and unequal but were in fact distinct species.
One writer who gave support to the polygenesist position was Edward
Long. In his popular History of Jamaica (1970 [1774]), Long quoted the work of
anatomists and biologists to emphasise what he claimed were similarities between
blacks and apes. In his opinion, blacks were 'brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty,
treacherous, thievish, mistrustful and superstitious' and slavery was a fitting
occupation for them. The publication of Charles White's A n Account of the Regular
Gradationsin Man (1799) added weight to Long's writing and reinforced the racial
prejudices of planters, colonisers and travellers. According to White, Negroes were
a distinct species closer to apes than Caucasians. They had 'smaller brains, larger
sexual organs, an ape-like odour and an animal-like immunity to pain' (Harris 1968,
89-90). Although most people supported the monegenesist position because it
accorded with the Christian version of events, the racial stereotypes put forward
by people like Long and White stuck and found their way into the pages of popular
magazines and journals.
THE LANGUAGE OF OPPRESSION 175

Unfortunately for the Aborigines, the colonisers who were taking their
land seemed to be all too well acquainted with these arguments and assertions.
In many cases one hears the exact phrase repeated. On the basis of his brief
encounter with the Port Phillip blacks in 1803, Lieutenant Tuckey described them
as 'a cruel, crafty, thievish race' without a redeeming feature (1805, 167-85). Ban-on
Field, in his Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, drew on the ethnologist
Pritchard's work for his section on the Aborigines, a people he described as the
'lowest among the varieties of human species' (1825, 82). This conclusion crops
up again and again in the works of colonial writers.
A good number of these colonial writers had been squatters themselves
and many of these books were aimed at the literate landholders and their families.
They were also regular subscribers to the Times and to periodicals such as
Blackwoods, the Quarterly, and the Edinburgh Review, and to their colonial
equivalents, the New South Wales Magazine and the Colonial Literary Review.
From such reading they absorbed popularised theories as well as detailed and often
derogatory information on the lifestyle and customs of 'savage tribes', including
the Australian Aborigines.

JUSTIFYING VIOLENCE
Thus, many of the squatters, even before they arrived in Australia, had internalised
a negative way of thinking about Aborigines and acquired a language to express
those thoughts. The intellectual argument that the Aborigines more closely
resembled 'the ourang outangs than men' made it easier for the squatter to treat
the Aborigines as subhuman, to lump them with the dingo and shoot them as a
rural pest'. In a chilling commentary on Henry Meyrick's words, the Reverend
W. Yate told the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines in 1838:
I have heard again and again people say that they (the
Aborigines) are nothing better than dogs, and that it was
not more harm to shoot them, than it would be to shoot
a dog when he barks at you (Yate 1838, 202).
Not all ministers of religion shared Yate's disgust at this. In his book Kangaroo
Land (1862) the Reverend A. Polehampton insisted that 'the Australian blacks are
little less ugly than gorillas, which indeed to my mind they much more nearly
resemble than white men or the higher types of blacks' (Polehampton 1862, 154).
The Reverend D.M. McKenzie, echoing Charles White, claimed that the Aborigines
had a particularly strong and disagreeable odour, 'so strong. ..that cattle smell it
at a distance' (1851, 135).
Squatters like Alexander Majoribanks, who tried their hand at writing,
show us just how influenced they were by what they read. Majoribanks quoted
176 MICHAEL CHRISTIE

and agreed with philosophers who argued that Aborigines not only had thicker
skulls but smaller crania than whites. According to another squatter, Hugh
Jamieson, who disagreed with the likes of Majoribanks, disdain of the Aborigines
was not confined to the colonies. 'The almost universal opinion of the world', he
wrote, 'seems to assign the Aboriginal natives of Australia to the very lowest place
in the scale of civilisation and of intellect' (Bride 1898, 269).
My contention that words abetted deeds on the frontier is borne out
by another colonial writer, Thomas Bartlett. Writing in 1843, a couple of years
after the Bolden incident, Bartlett insisted that there was a large group of settlers
who did not consider the Aborigines to be fellow creatures at all and used the
'harshest and most severe measures towards them' (Bartlett 1843, 65). Christopher
Hodgson agreed, referring to settlers who saw the Aborigines as 'a species of similar
acaudata, or tailless monkey', to be hunted down and exterminated (Hodgson 1846,
299). Alexander Majoribanks, quoted above, was one such squatter. 'The
Aborigines', he wrote, 'are universally allowed to be the lowest race of savages
in the known world and their extirpation would be of great benefit to the whole
of the country' (Majoribanks 1847,82,249).Such racist language not only paved
the way for the oppression of Aborigines but also served as a more acceptable
excuse for actions that were motivated by economic greed. As the Colonist pointed
out in an editorial on 16 January 1839:
Sordid interest is at the root of all this anti-aboriginefeeling.
Because the primitive lords of the soil interfere in some
of the frontier stations with the easy and lucrative grazing
of cattle and sheep, they are felt by the sensitive pockets
of the graziers to be a nuisance; and the best plea these
'gentlemen' can set up for their rights to abate the nuisance
by the summary process of stabbing, shooting, burning and
poisoning', is that the offenders are below the level of the
white man's species.
The academic theories about racial differences and the intellectuals' disgust at
Aboriginal life and culture filtered through to illiterate whites. Most convicts and
immigrant labourers also arrived in Australia with a distorted and prejudiced view
of the Aborigines. Once in Australia such misconceptions were aggravated by fear,
a fear that was often cultivated by jailers and squatters as a means of preventing
convicts or workers from escaping. The conclusions of racial theorists were often
encapsulated in the form of catchcries, sayings, proverbs and jokes. We have seen
how hackneyed phrases such as 'Aborigines are raised but little above brute
creation' appear again and again in the literature. Proverbs such as 'never trust
a savage' and racist jokes about the smell and sexuality of Aborigines were part
of the colonial vernacular.
THE LANGUAGE OF OPPRESSION 177

The language of the rural worker, and the hatred of the Aborigines
that it implied, was undoubtedly shaped in part by the literature of the day. But
the white workers' interaction with the blacks is at least more easily explained
than that of their educated counterparts, who often spoke of the civilising influence
of British colonisation.

CONCLUSION
This chapter began with a schoolyard chant 'sticks and stones will break my bones
but names will never hurt me'. It is a defiant and somewhat pitiful cry.
The point of this chapter is that names do hurt, that racist language
and racist ideas are the precursors of racist action, that it is easier to use sticks
and stones, guns and swords, poison or the pox, if you have already named your
victims, described them as worthless and subhuman. It is not an original thesis
nor a completed one. The squatters who used such general terms of abuse in regard
to the Aborigines interacted with them in more ways than those mentioned above.
There was an exchange - a two-way process occurring as the frontier moved -
that belies some of the language and attitudes outlined above. Words and action
went hand in hand on the frontier.
It suited squatters to redefine Aboriginal people when they needed
their labour or their sexual favours. But when squatters bought cheap land,
Aboriginal land, as they did on the frontier, the exchange between black and white
was tragic and one-sided for the Aborigines. It was then that the racist stereotypes
were of most use to the land-hungry squatter who might have to kill the original
owners in order to take the land. Sticks and stones will break your bones but names
will also hurt you.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. List all the words and phrases you can think of that use colour, particularly
black and white, for positive or negative purposes. Can you explain or justify these
uses?
2. There is a campaign today to eradicate 'sexist' language. Do phrases such as
'blacken one's character', or those you listed above, constitute 'racist' language?
Would you advocate eliminating such words or phrases?
3 . The comedian Lenny Bruce tried to take the sting out of derogatory terms
like 'nigger' and 'wog' by getting those who were insulted to laugh at the labels
rather than take offence at them. Do you think this is a solution?
4. Racism has often been bolstered by pseudo-scientific theories. Can you think
of any current theories that lend support to racism? Can you discredit them?
178 MICHAEL CHRISTIE

REFERENCES
Australian [newspaper]
1841 8 December.
Bartlett, T.
1843 New Holland, Smith and Son, London.
Black, N.
1839-41 Diary, typescript copy of original, MS 8996, La Trobe Library,
Melbourne.
Bolden, G.S.
1841 Deposition 24 October, Queen v Bolden, Crown Law Office files,
Criminal Trial Briefs, series 30, Public Record Office of Victoria.
Bride, T.F.
1898 Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Victorian Government Printer,
Melbourne.
Byrne, J.C.
1848 Twelve Years Wandering in the British Coloniesfrom 1835-47, 2 vols,
Bentley, London.
Colonist [newspaper]
1839 16 January.
Dampier, W. A.
1927 A New VoyageBound the World, Edited by N.M. Penzer, The Argonaut
Press, London.
Field, B. (ed)
1825 Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, Murray, London.
Harris, M.
1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Hodgson, C.
1846 Reminiscences of Australia with Hints on the Squatter's Life, Wright,
London.
Long, E.
1970
[l7741 History of Jamaica, 3 vols, Cass, London.
Majoribanks, A.
1847 Travels in New South Wales, Smith, Elder and CO, London.
McKenzie, D.M.
1851 Ten Years in Australia, Orr and CO, London.
Meyrick, H.H.
1840-47 Letters to his family in England, MS 7959, La Trobe Library,
Melbourne.
THE LANGUAGE OF OPPRESSION 179

Polehampton, A.
1862 Kangaroo Land, Houlston and Wright, London.
Port Phillip Gazette [newspaper]
1841 4 December.
1843 2 August.
Tuckey, J.
1805 A n Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Philip [sic],
Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, London.
White, C.
1799 A n Account of the Regular Gradations in Man, London.
B t e , W.
1838 Evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on
Aborigines, House of Commons, British Parliamentary Papers
v01 7.
 CHAPTER

LANGUAGE AND THE LAW:

13 WHITE AUSTRALIA
v NANCY

Diana Eades

INTRODUCTION

N ancy is a twenty-nine-year old Aboriginal woman who lives in a country town

in southern Queensland. In May 1990 she was charged with unlawful use
of a motor vehicle. She pleaded guilty and was fined $500 and placed on a twelve-
month good behaviour bond, but she was innocent. This story is fictional, but it
is based on a wide range of real cases studied by the author from the early 1980s.
To understand what happened, we need to know about Nancy, and
her family - about their background and way of living, about their values and
priorities. We need to know about their experience of being Aborigines in a n
Australian town, and about the differences between them and the non-Aboriginal
people in the town. And, in particular, we need to know about the linguistic and
cultural issues faced by Aboriginal people in their dealings with the law.
The next section of this chapter paints a picture of the lives of many
Australian Aborigines today, and some of the background which is essential t o
understanding their dealings with the legal system. The third section,
Understanding Nancy's Story' provides some of the cultural and linguistic
information which is also essential to this understanding. The chapter separates
these two sections in order to encourage you to think about cultural and linguistic
matters which are relevant to cross-cultural communication in Australia today.
Various parts of the next section are marked by letters (a), (b), and
so on; the section following that is divided into numbered subsections, each of
which is particularly relevant to one or more of the parts of the second section
marked by letters. When you have read the chapter, work out the puzzle of
matching the numbered subsections in the third section with the relevant parts
of the second section. The chapter was written in such a way that you should
be able to match each subsection with one letter - but you will doubtless see
additional subsections which are also relevant in some instances.

NANCY'S STORY
Nancy's family had always been proud of being Aboriginal, even in the generations
when it was easier (and often safer) for people of mixed Aboriginal descent t o
hide it. Grannie Lizzie, who died when Nancy was ten years old, often talked of
the 'dark ages' when she was growing up. She had been taken from her parents
182 DIANA EADES

at the age of about seven, and sent to the girls' dormitory at the Cherbourg
Aboriginal Reserve (about 200 kilometres northwest of Brisbane). Here she was
forbidden to speak her Waka Waka language, and she was only allowed to see her
mother and grandmother once a week. At the age of about thirteen years, Lizzie
was sent out west as a domestic on a large property. Although she was housed,
fed and clothed, she had to work six-and-a-half long days a week, never receiving
any payment. After trying to run away several times, Lizzie finally succeeded in
getting back to Cherbourg, where she gave birth to her first child, whose father
was the aggressive manager she had been determined to escape from.
At the age of twenty Lizzie gained the Reserve Superintendent's
permission to marry another Cherbourg resident and move away from the reserve.
She eventually had twelve children, the youngest of whom was her seventh
daughter Maud. The children received limited schooling, because Aboriginal
children were not allowed to attend school if non-Aboriginal parents objected to
them being there.
When Maud gave birth to Nancy in 1962, her family was living in
humpies on Sandy Creek, about ten kilometres east of the small town of Smithville.
It was a happy place with lots of cousins growing up, despite the hard living
conditions. There was no electricity, and the only water was what they carted
from the creek. Her parents and aunts and uncles worked hard at whatever they
could - mainly seasonal fruit and tobacco picking. At times the men worked for
the railways, and had to live as far away as north Queensland for months at a time.
The year that Nancy started school was the year that the Australian
government, acting on the result of a national referendum, allowed Aboriginal
people to register as voters, and to be counted for the first time in the census of
the population of Australia.
But school was difficult for Nancy and her relatives in many ways. The
white children laughed at them; and, when they learned about 'wild and savage
natives', Nancy felt ashamed to be one of the dark people. And it was so hard
to keep up with what was going on. The teacher asked so many questions and,
when the children didn't answer, she thought they were stupid, or sulky, or both. (a)
There were other problems: Nancy often felt 'shame', and although
the teacher seemed annoyed with her, she didn't know what she had done wrong.
(b) (c)
And then the teacher was always telling her to speak 'proper English',
not that 'bad, slovenly English, with the words left out'. (d)
Besides, it was hard to get to school, walking in about ten kilometres
every day. Sometimes it was too hot, sometimes Nancy just felt tired, and other
times it was too exciting at home - especially when relations came to stay from
LANGUAGE AND THE LAW 183

Cherbourg. And then sometimes her relations would take her back to see her
people, where she would stay for weeks at a time. (e)
In 1976, Nancy's family moved on to the Aboriginal reserve on the
western outskirts of Smithville. They were one of the first families to be allocated
a house to rent by the newly formed Aboriginal Housing Cooperative.
When she was sixteen year old Nancy had her first child. During the
next three years, while she stayed with her family on the reserve, two more children
were born. In 1985 Nancy and her de facto husband Jim moved into town, where
they still live today, renting a house through the Aboriginal Housing Co-operative.
Now that they are in town the troubles with the police seem worse
than they were on the reserve - maybe it was good to be out of sight, out there
past the town dump. In town the police always seem to notice the usual family
noise and the fights that happen from time to time, and often someone is
arrested.(f)
But Nancy likes being in town: she can walk to the shops, and it is
much easier for the children to get to school than it ever was for her. And she
wants her children to have a good education.
The hardest part is getting back out to the reserve to see her Mum
and Dad, her brothers who still live there, and all her other relatives. If one of
the Murries in town is driving out, she can usually get a lift. But often she has
to get a taxi. That's all right, unless it's that Harry driving the cab - he just hates
blacks.
On Saturday, 5 May, Nancy was very pleased to see her cousin Charlie
drive in from Jonesville, some eighty kilometres away. She guessed he'd borrowed
a car from up there, and now he was offering to take Nancy and her kids out to
see Mum. No good that h e was drunk, though - so Nancy drove.
Suddenly the flashing blue light pulled her over, and before she knew
it, Nancy was arrested for unlawful use of a motor vehicle.
In the police station, Nancy was scared. She had heard how one of
her cousins had been beaten by one of the policemen in Jonesville just last year.
She was scared that these two police officers would harass her like that. She was
surprised to think that young Charlie would have taken that car, and she wondered
whose it was, and where he had found it. She could hardly speak she was so scared.
But she hardly had to speak - the policemen seemed to do all the talking. She
wished she could read, to see what they were writing down. She told them what
happened: she was at home, but she had been out to town earlier in the morning,
after the boys left for football, whatever time that was; she came back, Charlie
turned up and offered her a lift to the reserve. But there were so many questions
that she didn't know what to do. (a)
184 DIANA EADES

Nancy was tired, scared and confused. She was worried about young
Charlie too - she should help him; after all, his father had helped her so much
when she had applied to the Housing Coop for the house. (g)
But then, when the policeman started to raise his voice, Nancy was
terrified - it was just like the teachers all those years ago at school. The best thing
would be to cooperate, so Nancy quickly said 'yes' to the questions. (h)
The policeman calmed down, soon the questions were over, and he
told her to see the Legal Aid man when he came to town the next week.
In the Legal Aid office a few days later, there were more questions.
Nancy was confused by the way that the lawyer was asking these questions. Here
are some of the problems faced by Nancy in this legal interview.
He asked lots of questions with 'or', like:
Nancy, were you down a t the creek that morning before
you got a lift with Charlie, or were you at home all morning?
To this Nancy answered 'yes'. (i)
And he wanted prompt answers, so there was no time to think about
the answers. Q)
She also felt as if most of the questions about time were too
complicated, such as:
What time did you go to town first?
How soon after that did you return home? (k)

The lawyer seemed kind, and he explained to Nancy that she would
have to go to Jonesville for the court case in four weeks' time. Nancy was really
scared now. She had been to court before, two years ago, when she was fined $70
for swearing outside t h e hotel in Smithville late one night. (1)
At least she would be with her cousin Charlie. But the lawyer explained
that Charlie would be going on a different day, in two weeks' time, because he
was to plead 'guilty'. He had stolen the car, and he had told the police how it
happened. He told the lawyer too. The lawyer would ask the magistrate to give
him a community service order rather than a gaol sentence. Everyone was very
worried about the rising numbers of deaths of Aboriginal people in gaols,
particularly young men. It would be better for people like Charlie, who were not
dangerous, to pay for their crime and help the community.
The lawyer explained it all to Nancy. If she genuinely had not known
that Charlie had stolen the car, then she must plead 'not guilty'. Then she would
go to court in four weeks' time, and answer the questions from the police
prosecutor, and from her own lawyer.
LANGUAGE AND THE LAW 185

Nancy's head was spinning. She hated all their questions. Migeloos ask
so many questions all the time - it's dangerous to answer them, and it's dangerous
not to answer them. Nancy made up her mind.
Two weeks later Nancy was in court. The charge of knowingly driving
a stolen motor vehicle was read out to her. She was asked 'How do you plead?'
Her answer was:
'Guilty, eh?'

UNDERSTANDING NANCY'S STORY

(1) Aboriginal English can be regarded as a dialect of English in much the same
way as Scottish English and American English. There are different ways of speaking
Aboriginal English in different parts of the country, just as there are different
ways of speaking American English in different parts of the United States. Think
for example of the dialectal differences between American English and Australian
English. In Australian English, we say 'She's in hospital', but to American English
speakers this sounds a bit weird, and speakers of this dialect say 'She's in the
hospital'. Neither dialect is right or wrong, but there are systematic differences
between them. This is the same situation with the difference between Standard
Australian English and Aboriginal English.
Aboriginal English is also related to traditional Aboriginal languages.
For example, in traditional Aboriginal languages (as in many other languages of
the world) there is no equivalent of the English verb 'to be'. So the sentence Geen
junggoor in Waka Waka (Nancy's Grannie Lizzie's language) would translate literally
into English as 'Woman sick'. This grammatical structure has remained in many
varieties of Aboriginal English and you may hear Aboriginal people say 'woman
sick' instead of Standard English 'the woman is sick'.
It is only since the late 1960s that Aboriginal English has been
recognised as a distinct dialect of English with its own rules. Most non-Aboriginal
Australians still mistakenly think that this dialect of English is 'bad English', or
somehow inferior to Standard English, just because it has different rules.
(2) Aboriginal people are often uncomfortable about the way in which
non-Aboriginal people ask them questions (see also Yallop's comments on the
grammar of questions in chapter 2). This is because there are significant cultural
differences between the two groups in the way that information is sought. While
the direct question is central to most information seeking in mainstream Australian
society, Aboriginal people throughout Australia, whether they speak a traditional
language or Aboriginal English, frequently use a range of indirect means of finding
186 DIANA EADES

out information. For example, they make a hinting statement and wait for a
response:
I'm wondering about what happened last night. I need to
know about why you didn't do your homework.

Or they may volunteer information for confirmation or denial:

It seems as if everyone went to the creek after school.
People might say that no-one likes the Maths teacher. (I
think) maybe no-one likes the Maths teacher.

Or they may tell people what they need to find out about, and then wait for a
later occasion before receiving an answer.
It is clear that silence - giving people time - is important to all of
these Aboriginal ways of finding out information.
Although some questions are used, it is considered rude in Aboriginal
cultures to question people about many things, or to put them on the spot.
Individual personal privacy is protected by the constraints on direct questions in
many situations.
(3) Aboriginal people throughout Australia often answer 'yes' or agree
to whatever is being asked by a non-Aboriginal questioner, even if they do not
understand the question. This phenomenon, which has been observed for many
decades, has recently been labelled 'gratuitous concurrence' (Liberman 1985).
Liberman explains this gratuitous concurrence as a way that Aboriginal people
have developed to protect themselves in their interactions with non-Aboriginal
Australians. It occurs particularly where the questioner, say a teacher or police
officer, has authority over the Aboriginal person being questioned.
Thus, a very common strategy for Aborigines being asked a number
of questions by non-Aborigines is to agree, regardless of either their understanding
of the question or their belief about the truth or falsity of the proposition being
questioned. Their apparent agreement often really means something like this: 'I
think that if I say "yes" you will see that I am obliging, and socially amenable,
and you will think well of me, and things will work out well between us'. This
is undoubtedly one of the major problems facing Aboriginal people seekingjustice
in the legal system.
(4) Questions which ask the respondent to choose one of two
alternatives are rarely found in the linguistic structure of traditional Aboriginal
languages or in Aboriginal English. So such questions, known as either-or
questions, may confuse the Aboriginal person being questioned, who often simply
answers: 'yes'.
LANGUAGE AND THE LAW 187

( 5 ) Silence is an important and positively valued part of many

Aboriginal conversations. This is a difficult matter for most non-Aboriginal people
to recognise and learn, because in Western societies silence is so often negatively
valued in conversations. Between people who are not close friends or family, silence
in conversations or interviews is frequently an indication of some kind of
communication breakdown. On the contrary, in Aboriginal societies silence usually
indicates a participant's desire to think, or simply to enjoy the presence of others
in a non-verbal way. Because Aboriginal people are so accustomed to using silence
in conversation with other Aboriginal people, many are uncomfortable if they are
not given the chance to use silence in their conversations or interviews with non-
Aboriginal people.
This difference has serious implications for many interactions in
mainstream Australian society where the question-answer method of seeking
information is fundamental, such as employment interviews, doctor-patient
interviews, school classrooms, and legal interviews, whether in the police station,
the lawyer's office or the courtroom. Aboriginal silence in these settings can easily
be interpreted as evasion, ignorance, confusion, insolence, or even guilt. In
Australian courts of law, silence is not to be taken as admission of guilt, but it
would be difficult for police officers, legal professionals or jurors to set aside strong
cultural intuitions about the meaning of silence, especially if they were not aware
of cultural differences in the use and interpretation of silence.
(6) Another important cultural difference in conversations concerns
the use of eye contact. Direct eye contact is frequently avoided in Aboriginal
interactions where it is seen as threatening or rude. Conversely, in much non-
Aboriginal interaction in Australia, the avoidance of eye contact, especially by
someone who has been asked a question, is interpreted as rudeness, evasion or
dishonesty. This cultural difference in use and interpretation of eye communication
can be very important in the classroom, as well as in police or courtroom interviews.
(7) Speakers of Aboriginal English, like speakers of traditional
languages, often reckon time not by the clock or calendar, but in reference to some
social or seasonal or climatic event. So, for example, an answer to the question
'When did that happen?', might be 'just before Max turned up', or 'around sunrise'.
When asked to give specific clock times, Aboriginal people often find it hard to
be accurate and consistent.
(8) Many cultural values and practices which are important in
traditional Aboriginal societies are still important in non-traditional Aboriginal
societies, such as Nancy's. For example, responsibilities for childrearing are shared
among a wide group of relatives, and it is often considered beneficial for a child
to move around between various relatives from the extended family.
188 DIANA EADES

(9) Another cultural value which is important in non-traditionally

oriented Aboriginal societies, as in traditionally oriented societies, is loyalty to
kin. Aboriginal people expect each other to be loyal to a wide extended family.
In many ways Aboriginal cultural values emphasise the family group rather than
the individual, and this is seen in many of the choices and actions of Aboriginal
people.
(10) Another cultural practice which can be seen in Aboriginal societies
throughout Australia is the preference for outdoor living and the expectation that
people will see and hear much of what goes on in Aboriginal family life. Studies
of traditionally oriented Aboriginal camps show that physical privacy is a low
priority. And in towns and cities today the same is often true. Small houses
accommodate large families or many members of an extended family, and by non-
Aboriginal standards they are frequently overcrowded. Much day-to-day living
takes place in open, outside areas such as the main street of towns, in parks and
other public places, or on the verandahs and in the yards of houses. The open
way that many members of an Aboriginal family live in towns and suburbs often
results in cultural clash with non-Aboriginal neighbours and police officers.
(11)One of the most common offences with which Aboriginal people
are charged is that of using obscene language. Aboriginal people are particularly
vulnerable to this charge because of their open lifestyle. But the very notion of
'obscene language' involves a significant area of cultural clash between
contemporary Aboriginal and mainstream Australian societies. Simply put, what
is widely considered to be obscene language in many sectors of mainstream
Australian society is much less likely to be offensive in Aboriginal societies.
Swearing, like fighting, is considered to be a normal part of Aboriginal social
interaction, and in particular a necessary part of settling disputes.
A further difference from most of non-Aboriginal Australia is that there
is no gender distinction in this matter. That is, Aboriginal people do not generally
consider swearing to be stronger or more offensive if it comes from a woman.
(12) One of the strongest Aboriginal concepts is the feeling of 'shame'
which is felt when people are singled out in front of a group, whether it be for
praise or for rebuke. This concept of 'shame' has no simple equivalent in non-
Aboriginal society, but it is like a mixture of embarrassment and fear.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why did Nancy plead guilty to a crime she did not commit?
2. Although this paper has been about speakers of Aboriginal English, many of
the cultural and linguistic issues raised here are relevant also t,o speakers of
LANGUAGE AND THE LAW 189

traditional Aboriginal languages. What do you think are some of the additional
disadvantages faced by speakers of traditional Aboriginal languages in their
dealings with the law?
3. Read this summary of the famous 'Ann Arbor case' in the United States.
In America, the dialect of English spoken by Afro-Americans or Blacks,
became the subject of a landmark court case in 1979 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Black
parents a t an elementrary school in a low-income housing area took the School
District Board to court for failing to recognise the language difficulties faced by
their children, and to educate them accordingly. The children were all speakers
of the Black dialect of English (known as Black English Vernacular, or BEV), which,
like Aboriginal English, is a significantly different dialect of English. The children,
who were achieving very poorly at school, were classified by the school as learning
disabled, or in need of speech therapy. The parents' case depended on whether
BEV was sufficiently different from Standard English to constitute a barrier to
learning. With the help of linguists, the parents were successful. The judge ordered
that the school district must recognise BEV, must develop a program to help
teachers to recognise it, and must offer teachers methods of using that knowledge
in teaching Black children Standard English.
Now discuss the question:
What are the implications of this American case for educators of Aboriginal
English speaking students in Australia?

WIDER BACKGROUND
There has not been room in this chapter to discuss many aspects of Aboriginal
English, and of the legal and historical factors involved in Nancy's story, but the
following sources will provide more information.

Aboriginal English
Eades, D.
1988 They Don't Speak an Aboriginal Language, or Do They? In I. Keen
(ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures i n 'Settled' Australia,
Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 97-115.
1991 Communicative Strategies in Aboriginal English. In S. Romaine (ed),
Language i n Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
84-93.
Kaldor, S. and I.G. Malcolm.
1991 Aboriginal English - An Overview. In S. Romaine (ed),Language i n
Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 67-83.
190 DIANA EADES

Aborigines and the Law

Gale. F., R. Bailey-Harris and J. Wundersitz
1990 Aboriginal Youth and the Criminal Justice System: The Justice of
Injustice?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hanks, P. and B. Keon-Cohen (eds)
1984 Aborigines and the Law, George Alien and Unwin, Sydney.
Hazlehurst, K. (ed)
1987 Ivory Scales: Black Australia and the Law, NSW University Press,
Sydney.
Koch, H.
1991 Language and Communication in Aboriginal Land Claim Hearings.
In S. Romaine (ed) Language in Australia, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 94-103.
Liberman, K.
1985 Understanding Interaction in Central Australia: A n
Ethmethodological Study of Australian Aboriginal People,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston.
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC)
1988 Interim Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
1991 Final Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.

A submission by the Queensland Aboriginal Co-ordinating

Council to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths
in Custody in August 1990 compared Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal appearances in Queensland Magistrate's Courts.
This submission showed that Aborigines are 11 times more
likely to be charged with unlawful use of a motor vehicle,
13times more likely to appear for drunkenness, and 7 times
more likely to appear for offensive behaviour (p 5 2 ) .

History of Aboriginal Reserves in Queensland

FAIRA
1979 Beyond the Act: Queensland Aborigines and Islanders: What Do We
Want?
Wearne, H.
1980 A Clash of Cultures: Queensland Aboriginal Policy (1824-1980),
Uniting Church, Brisbane.
 CHAPTER

LANGUAGE AND
TERRITORIALITY IN
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

Alan Rumsey

INTRODUCTION

L inguists who have studied Australian Aboriginal languages (myself included)

often get asked how to translate this or that English expression into
'Aboriginal'. As anyone who has got very far in reading this book will know, there
is no such language. Rather, there are, even now, at least 100 quite distinct
Aboriginal languages, and 200 years ago there were many more. What relation
is there between these language differences and other kinds of Aboriginal social
differentiation?
Those who are aware of the diversity of Aboriginal languages generally
think of this as a matter of tribal differentiation: each language is (or was) spoken
by a distinct tribe. I am going to try to show in this chapter that that is a mistaken
view - that language is actually related to the territorial differentiation in a quite
different way. My evidence will come from two sources: from recent findings of
the Aboriginal Land Commission in the Northern Territory, and from some other
recent studies by anthropologists and anthropological linguists. First, I want to
review some older ideas about this topic, which were widely held by anthropologists
until recently, and probably still are held by most non-Aboriginal Australians.

LANGUAGE AND 'TRIBE'

One of the preconceptions most people have about Aborigines (at least those living
in central and northern Australia) is that they are 'tribal'. What does that mean?
Among other things, it means that they come in 'tribes'. But what is a tribe? Some
of the better-known examples of Aboriginal social groupings which are generally
referred as to 'tribes' include Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte, Warlpiri, Kamilaroi and
Wiradjuri. But what do we mean when we refer to these as 'tribes'? If we look
at the ways in which that word has been defined or used in relation to Aborigines,
we find that it generally involves one or more of the following characteristics:
1. most or all members of the tribe live, or used to live, in a single, clearly bounded
region;
2. they speak a common language or dialect which is unique to them;
3 . they tend to marry within the tribe;
4. they share certain customs or cultural traits which are unique to their tribe.
192 ALAN RUMSEY

Where do we get all these ideas about the nature of tribes? One thing
to notice right away about them is that they are also characteristics which we
attribute to the kind of social grouping which non-tribal peoples are thought to
have instead of tribes, namely the nation-state. Indeed, what are now called
Aboriginal 'tribes' in Australia were also commonly referred to in the nineteenth
century as 'nations'. Even as recently as 1976, an eminent linguist claimed of
northeast Queensland that 'the only major difference' between 'the (so-called)
'tribes". ..and what are called nations in Europe and other parts of the world.. .was
in terms of population size' (Dixon 1976, 219-20).
But the idea of the nation-state is a very recent and historically specific
one. Despite the fact that they are now everywhere, very few nation-states existed
200 years ago, and 400 hundred years ago they were unheard of. Since Australian
Aboriginal cultures developed largely independently of outside influences for at
least 40,000 years, we should be very cautious about assuming that a kind of
institution developed here which just happens to include a good many of the
characteristics of the nation-state. This is not to say that it could not have happened
but, rather, that any such claim must be examined carefully. We cannot assume
that any particular attribute will necessarily be found in combination with any
other: so, each of the presumed ones must be considered separately in light of
the available evidence. I will now do this for each of the four characteristics listed
above, in reverse order.
The third and fourth characteristics may be quickly disposed of, as
even those few scholars who have included them in their definition of tribe, have
generally seen them as tendencies only. The rates of in-marriage ('endogamy') vary
greatly from one 'tribe' to another, and are often lower than they are in a given
area among 'countrymen' from more than one 'tribe'. And there may be important
cultural differences within named 'tribes'. Circumcision, for instance, was practised
by the southern Jawoyn people (east of Katherine, Northern Territory) in common
with neighbouring 'tribes' to the east, south and west, but not by the northern
Jawoyn. Thus, traits (3)and (4)cannot be taken as necessary attributes of the 'tribe'.
In the end, those who have seriously tried to define the 'tribe' have
generally fallen back on only the first two traits mentioned above: common links
to a definite territory and common language. See, for example Howitt (1904, 41),
Spencer (1921, lxiii), and Woodward (1974, 142) to be discussed below.
But this apparently simple definition has proven difficult to apply, for
several reasons. First, regarding territoriality, the correlation between 'tribal'
affiliation and residence is only a very loose one. This is true even in outback
regions such as the Northern Territory. A very thorough statistical study which
was based on data gathered there in the 1950s (Milliken 1976) showed that most
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 193

AD Andiliaugwa JG Jinang MM Malak Malak

AL Alawa JJ Jaminjung MO Maung
BA Burara Anbara JL Jingili MQ Marangu
BD Birdangal JM Jambarbwingu MR Mangarai
BG Burara Gunardba JU Jugal MU Mandalbu
B1 Birgili JW Jalwa MW Manwuda
BJ Bapmurung" KA Karama MX Minaj!
BK Burara Mukali L1 Liagaiawumin MY Mod
BL Balamumu LM Lamumtf! NB Ngaikbun
BM Burara Madai LR Larakia ND Ngandi
BR Burara Maring; MA Mare NK Nakara
BU Burara MB Manpbai NL Ngainmil
BY Buyuyugululrn8r MC Maragula NM Nganngman
B2 Bnnkin MD Manda NN Nalakan
DA oangu ME Menngarr NO Nangromin
DB Dab, MF Mangaliii NR Ngarr
DD Dadiwui MG Maranunggu NY Nunggubuyu
DL Day! MH Maramanad]! RE Rembarmga
DN Dangbon Ml Maieh Rl Rllarrngu
DU Duala MJ Mangandj RR Riraidrngu
DW Dalwangu MK Mangu Tl TIWI

Map 8: Aboriginal group distribution according to residential patterns (from

Milliken 1976, inside back cover)

members of most tribes did indeed live within a single identifiable region of the
Territory, but that none of these regions was clearly bounded off from the others.
Rather, there was an enormous amount of overlap among them, such that the
membership of every 'tribe' was residentially dispersed among that of many others.
The degree of dispersal has no doubt increased since European colonisation and
the wholesale movement of Aboriginal people onto large government settlements
and into towns. But it would be a mistake to read backwards from this to a situation
in which we assume that tribes were sharply bounded residential groups. For, as
far as we can tell from the available details of life history and genealogy going
back to the pre-European past, a significant portion of Aboriginal marriages have
always been between people of different 'tribes', especially in areas where
differences at the level of 'tribe' are of greatest political importance. In such cases,
194 ALAN RUMSEY

one of the marriage partners usually ends up spending most of hisher time in
the 'tribe' territory of the other, and the children may end up living in either, or
yet another. Moreover, the life histories of many men show a high degree of
residential mobility, within and beyond their 'tribal' territories' (see Myers 1986,
77-102; Warner 1964,467-90 for examples from the Western Desert and northeast
Arnhem Land).
This is not to say that there is no connection at all between tribal
identity and territoriality. On the contrary, despite all the complicationsregarding
residence, it is clear from what Aboriginal people say all around Australia that
they think of the land as divided up into more-or-less clearly bounded regions,
each associated with a label such as Warlpiri, Wiradjuri, and so forth. In this
respect, there is a striking contrast between the residential map resulting from
Milliken's study, cited above, which is full of crossing lines and multiple overlaps,
and that of Tindale (1974), which shows the whole of Australia neatly divided
into a jigsaw puzzle of named tribal territories (see Maps 8 and 9). While the precise
location of some of the boundaries drawn by Tindale has been disputed, no one
has seriously challenged the idea that each 'tribal' name is associated in principle
with a more-or-less clearly bounded region. Confusion arises only when we try
to think of the tribal name as referring, in the first instance, to a group of people,
and then to delimit its territory according to where those people live. Rather, it
refers, in the first instance, to a piece of land.

Map 9: An example of Aboriginal group distribution according to Tindale (after

Tindale 1974).
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 195

Almost every such label (Warlpiri, Wiradjuri, et cetera) also refers to

a language. Why should this be so? Presumably because there is some kind of link
between language and territory. Most people who have offered definitions of 'tribe'
in Australia have assumed that that link is established by the fact that there is
a distinct group of people, the tribe, who both occupy (andlor 'own') the territory
and speak the language. Hence, the second of the two basic definitional features
of the tribe: that its members are distinguished from others by speaking a common
language.
But this assumption has now proven untenable. For, as more and more
studies are made of Australian Aboriginal languages and their patterns of use, it
becomes ever more obvious that almost no one speaks only one of them. As one
linguist has put it: Australian Aborigines are 'the leading contenders for being
the most multilingual people in the world' (Laycock 1979, 82). Tb this day, in
mainland areas where Aboriginal languages are spoken, almost every fluent
speaker is fluent in at least two of them, and it is not uncommon for one person
to speak four or five, even in areas where the languages differ greatly in grammar
and vocabulary. Nor does speakership cluster in such a way that, for example,
languages A and B are spoken by all and only the members of some particular
'tribe' (Sutton 1978). Unlike in most parts of the world, language boundaries in
Aboriginal Australia are not significant communicative boundaries, because people
tend to be able to speak the languages of neighbouring regions as well as their own.
Here we are faced with an apparent paradox: the names for Aboriginal
languages seem to identify them clearly with tribal territories, but it is not possible
to delimit any clear-cut, non-overlapping groups of people on the basis of the
languages they speak. To show how this paradox can be resolved, I turn now to
some developments that have taken place during the course of recent land claim
hearings in the Northern Territory.

THE ABORIGINAL LAND COMMISSION

During the past twenty years, especially in the Northern Territory, traditional
Aboriginal forms of land tenure have been the subject of more intensive expert
investigation than ever before. Much of this work has been done in connection
with the passage and implementation of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern
Territory) Act 1976, which for the first time gave some groups of Aboriginal
Australians secure legal title to some or all of their traditional territories. This was
done in two different ways. First, areas of the Northern Territory that had already
been set aside as Aboriginal reserves (Arnhem Land, for example) were
immediately converted to Aboriginal Land. Second, certain other kinds of land,
196 A M RUMSEY

chiefly vacant crown land, could become the subject of Aboriginal land claims,
to be presented before a kind of royal commission - the Aboriginal Land
Commission - which was specifically created to hear such claims and, after
deliberating upon them, to make recommendations to the federal Minister for
Aboriginal Affairs.
These land claim hearings have proven far more arduous and protracted
than anyone had expected. Masses of data have had to be gathered for them
concerning Aboriginal people's relation to land, and thousands of hours of oral
evidence from Aboriginal and other expert witnesses have been heard by the
commission, resulting in hundreds of volumes of transcript. By contrast, among
anthropologists specialising in Australian Aboriginal cultures, traditional land
tenure had not been one of the major topics of investigation before the 1960s,
and little had been published on it in comparison with topics such as kinship and
ritual.
Under those circumstances, the work of the Aboriginal Land
Commission was bound to produce some surprises, and it did. Most of them are
beyond the scope of this chapter, which is specifically concerned with the role
of language in relation to land and people. But in that regard, there is much to
learn from the way Aboriginal people have chosen to present their claims.
The 1973-74 Royal Commission on whose inquiry the Land Rights Act
was based - the Woodward Commission - clearly did not expect 'tribes' or
'language groups' to put themselves forward as claimants for land. Their finding
was that the kind of Aboriginal groups that customarily held land were a kind
of subdivision of the language group rather than the whole language group. In
some areas the land-owning groups were thought to be 'dialect groups'. More
commonly, they were what it called 'clans'. As for the more inclusive groups, which
it called 'language groups' or 'tribes', the commission, adopting the minimal
definition I have discussed above, saw each of them as having 'a common language,
a commonly used name for that language and thus for the people speaking it, and
an identifiable tract of country where those people live or used to live' (Woodward
1974, 142). Tribes were in this view dismissed as of little or no relevance for land
tenure. In the words of the report: 'In no sense can the tribe be regarded as the
basis of Australian social organization' (142). In all these respects, the Woodward
Commission Report carries over a very influential view of Australian land tenure
propounded by the first Australian Professor of Anthropology, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown
(1930-31), who saw the 'clan' or 'horde' as having exclusive proprietary rights in
land.
The Land Rights Act itself would seem to have incorporated the
Woodward Commission's views when it defined 'traditional Aboriginal owner' in
LANGUAGE A N D TERRITORIALITY

such a way as to require Aborigines claiming land to show (among other things)
that they comprise a 'local descent group'. For language groups, if their membership
is distinguished solely by their speaking a common language, cannot be 'descent
groups', whereas clans clearly are. Where clans exist - in northeast Arnhem Land,
for example - everyone belongs to one of them, namely that of his or her father
(in other words, they are what anthropologists call 'patrilineal' clans). That is why
such groups have always been readily accepted, in terms of the Act's definition
of 'traditional Aboriginal owner', as descent groups. And since each such clan is
also associated with a particular set of sites or an 'estate', they are 'local' descent
groups.
In the first nine land claims heard by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner
(during 1977-80) the claimants presented their case for traditional ownership in
groupings which were readily recognisable as patrilineal clans of the orthodox
Radcliffe-Brownian sort. There was extensive testimony and deliberation
concerning issues such as: Is this particular claimant group a clan? Does this
particular clan qualify as traditional owner for this particular bit of claimable land?
Can people with links to the clan other than through their father (for example,
through their mother or grandmother) be included among the traditional owners
of its estate? But there was no serious challenge to the assumption that the estates
in question were clan estates, to which the points of possible linkage were provided
by a core of kinsmen related through the male line, even if links to that 'core'
might sometimes be through women.
The first real challenges to this assumption came in the early 1980s,
when the commissioner first began hearing claims over land within the area of
earliest and greatest impact from colonisation in the Northern Territory: the
western half of the Tbp End. At the Finniss River hearing in 1980, the claimants
presented themselves in groupings which, in terms of the Woodward Report, were
not 'clans' but 'tribes': Maranunggu, Kungarakany and Warai (Aboriginal Land
Commissioner 1981). On the evidence presented at the hearing, it is not clear that
anything like the clan ever existed in this area. Certainly by 1980, there was no
clear evidence for even a vestigial system of patrilineal clans or discrete clan estates.
The claimants related themselves to land at the level of what they themselves
called 'tribes', each of which was in principle associated with a well-bounded
region, a language, and a name for that language.
In the following year a similar grouping, called the Malak-
MalakMadngele, presented themselves as claimants in the Daly River region, about
100 kilometres south of the Finniss River claim area. This claim differed from the
Finniss River one in that, here, there was also at least a vestigial system of clan-
like groupings, each of which was associated with certain sites within the larger
198 ALAN RUMSEY

Malak-Malak/Madngele region. Some of these groups had no surviving members.

Sites or estates formerly associated with those extinct groups were said to have
been 'taken over' by the Malak-Malak/Madngele group as a whole (Sutton and
Palmer 1981; Aboriginal Land Commissioner 1982).
Further up the Daly River system, a claim was heard in 1983-84 over
crown lands in the vicinity of Katherine, where a tradition also survives (among
older people at least) of clan-like groupings, albeit with less clear-cut territorial
associations than among the Malak-MalakIMadngele.The whole area under claim
was said in Aboriginal testimony to have belonged to the Jawoyn people (Aboriginal
Land Commissioner 1988)- a grouping which, again, would have been considered
by Radcliffe-Brown to be a 'tribe', of which the various 'clans' were component
parts.
In each of these three claims, as in some subsequent ones, the 'tribal'
groupings not only chose to present themselves as such but were in the end
accepted by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner as traditional owners of at least
some of the land in question (Aboriginal Land Commissioner 1981, 1982, 1988).
Indeed, in the Katherine claim (and perhaps in the Malak-Malak one, though the
judge's report is ambiguous on the matter) they were acknowledged in preference
to the clan-like units even for areas where the latter were clearly of some relevance
as local descent groups. This is in spite of the Woodward Commission's conclusion
of a few years before that 'the language group was never a social or political unit,
and so never a land-holding group' (Woodward 1974, 145).
What are we to make of the apparent disparity between those earlier
conclusions and the outcome of the land claim process in the Northern Territory?
Part of the answer is that language groups have probably become more important
as clans have become less viable as a result of European invasion and settlement.
Consider, for example, the history of the Alligator Rivers region, just to the west
of Arnhem Land. It has been estimated that, as a direct result of colonisation which
began there in the 1880s, the Aboriginal population within the next two generations
was reduced to about 5 per cent of what it had been (Keen 1980). As a result,
many clans died out altogether, and whole language groups were reduced to about
the same size as some single clans had been before.
A hundred miles to the south, in and east of Katherine, a similar, if
somewhat less drastic decline was being experienced by the Jawoyn people, to
whom I have referred above in my review of land claim proceedings. By 1940,
only a small fraction of the Jawoyn population were living on or near country
associated with their particular clan, and by 1980 it was impossible to find out,
for most of the clans, where that country had been. But there was a very clear
understanding where Jawoyn country was, and most Jawoyn people were still living
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 199

on it (as indeed they still are, along with many other non-Jawoyn Aboriginal
people). Most of the younger people had no clear idea what clan they belonged
to, but their identity as Jawoyn was known by all, and of very great importance
to them.
But what exactly is the basis of that identity? In our review of the
notion of 'tribe' above, we were left with only two features - common territory
and common language - and it seemed impossible to relate even those two to
each other, since almost no one speaks only one Aboriginal language.
Here is where the evidence from land claim hearings has proven very
enlightening. For, in land claims where language groups have been recognised by
the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, the ability to speak t h e language in question
has proven to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for inclusion within
the group. If it had been a necessary condition, many of the younger claimants
- including almost all of them in the Finniss River hearing - would have to have
been excluded, as their main linguistic competence is in various forms of English.
Conversely, if it had been a sufficient condition, some people would have been
included among the claimants - in the Katherine claim and probably elsewhere
as well - who had had little or no association with the area in question, and who
were not identified with it by themselves or anyone else. More generally, although
many Aboriginal people in this area speak three or four Aboriginal languages, no
one is equally identified with that many language names or 'identifiable tracts
of country': not everyone who speaks Jawoyn, even fluently, feels entitled to say
'I am Jawoyn' or 'Jawoyn is my language' (Merlan and Rumsey 1982). The relevant
relationship to language is not one of speakership, but one which is better glossed
as language ownership (as in Sutton 1978; Sutton and Palmer 1981).

LAND, LANGUAGE AND PEOPLE

In order to see how that relationship is constructed in Aboriginal terms, let us
reconsider the interrelationships among the three terms I mentioned above: land,
language, people. I said that Westerners tend to assume that any link between
territory and language will be established by the fact that there is a distinct group
of people, the tribe, who both occupy (andlor 'own') the territory and speak the
language. But in the land claim process, the links between language and land which
have proven most relevant have not been of the kind which are mediated by links
between language and people (as in Western ideologies of 'tribe' and nation) but,
rather, are direct links between particular languages and particular tracts of
country. Thus, it is not the case that, for example, Jawoyn country is called that
because it is or was occupied by people who speak the Jawoyn language. Rather,
200 ALAN RUMSEY

it is called Jawoyn country because it is the region in which that language was
directly installed or 'planted' in the landscape by Nabilil 'Crocodile', a Dreamtime
creator figure who moved up the Katherine River, establishing sites and leaving
names for them in the Jawoyn language (Merlan and Rumsey 1982). In this
formulation, language and country are directly linked, and the mediated link is
between language and people: Jawoyn people are Jawoyn not because they speak
Jawoyn, but because they are linked to places to which the Jawoyn language is
also linked.
What is the basis of that linkage? In all the land claims hearings where
this matter has been taken up, it turns out to be a matter of what anthropologists
call filiation - links through one or both parents. Thus, for example, when helping
the Jawoyn claimants to prepare their case, the assisting anthropologists, Francesca
Merlan and I, compiled a list of all living persons - approximately 400 of them
- who were identified by Aboriginal people in the area as Jawoyn. We recorded
the family trees of all these people, including, among other information, the clan
and language group membership of their parents, and what languages they could
speak. The latter did not correlate closely with language group membership. But
parentage did. In every single case, it turned out that one or both of the Jawoyn
claimant's parents were also identified as Jawoyn. (In a very few cases these were
what we would call 'adoptive' parents instead of 'biological' ones, but in all such
cases, they were the ones who had actually reared the person.) From this and from
claimants' explanations about why they were considered Jawoyn, we concluded
that filiation provided the basis for language group membership, and that ability
to speak the language did not.
This conclusion was well-supported in the claimants' evidence at the
land claim hearing. When witness after witness was asked why he, she, or
somebody else was considered to be Jawoyn (or of some other language group),
the answer was never 'Because I speak Jawoyn', but almost always 'Because my
father was' or 'Because my mother was'.
Thus, contrary to Justice Woodward's conclusions concerning 'language
groups', it became possible to regard them as local descent groups. They were
'descent groups' in that their membership was determined not, as he had supposed,
by speaking a common language, but by filiation from a member of the group.
And they were local in that each is clearly identified with a particular region,
with which the language is also identified.
It is in the latter respect - in the postulation of direct links between
land and language - that Jawoyn and European world views are most different.
But it is clear that the Jawoyn are not unusual in this respect among Aboriginal
groups. The more one comes to understand the principle involved, the more evident
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 201

Plate 5; Claimant Peter Jatbula gives evidence in Jawoyn (Gimbat area) land
claim hearing, October 1992 (photograph by Alan Rumsey).

it becomes just how widespread is its application. Let us consider some other
examples, from anthropological sources rather than from Aboriginal Land Claim
hearings,

OTHEREXAMPLES OF THE UNKBETWEENLANGUAGEAND LAND

says that now, from that

202 ALAN RUMSEY

A thousand kilometres to the west, in the Kimberley district of Western

Australia, the Ngarinyin people have told me of how their language originated
at a place called Gulemen, 'Beverly Springs', where it was first spoken in the
Dreamtime by Possum. From there he carried it all over present-day Ngarinyin
country, and that is why the language is there today.
Far to the east, at Doomadgee in northwestern Queensland, the
territories of the Ganggalida, Garawa, and Waanyi people are:
where particular languages are said to 'belong', implying
that they fit there appropriately with other features of the
landscape. When in that area using bush resources, and
certainly when formally dealing with many totemic and
other extra-human features of the landscape, it is
appropriate to speak the language which belongs there.
Other Aboriginal languages would not be effective in ritual
matters; indeed use of another language may well bring
forth hostility from totemic forces.
The concept of language as a fundamental
characteristic of landscape is also evident from mythic
accounts where travelling totemic figures change their
language on reaching the boundary of a linguistic territory
- as, for example, in the story of a snake who switches
from Jingalu to Waanyi at the present border between the
two. (Trigger 1987, 217-19).

In central Australia, T.G.H. Strehlow, who grew up among Arrernte

(Aranda) people a t Hermannsburg Mission, was told of how a Dreamtime horde
of native cats:
after travelling from Port Augusta in South Australia
through the territory of the Jankuntjatjara and Matuntara,
entered the Aranda area at Ilbirla -a series of springs.. .
As soon as they crossed the Palmer River their ears were
deafened by the chirping of crickets in the river grass; ...in
their confusion, they began to speak in a mixture of Aranda
and 'Loritja' [Luritja, Western Desert Language] after
speaking only 'Loritja' during their previous travels over
many hundreds of miles of Western Desert Country.
From this point on they.. .began to address each
other by [class-] names. And after they had gone on, night
overspread the land behind their sterns, while they went
forward in broad daylight.
And they laid down [as a barrier] that great
expanse of sandhills,. ..those sandhills covered with stands
of desert oaks. (Strehlow 1965, 133)
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 203

The 'class names' to which Strehlow refers are part of a system which divides the
whole of society into four or eight 'skins', and specifies who may or may not marry
each other. (This system is similar to that described earlier by Bavin for Warlpiri
in chapter 6.) Strehlow reports that the Luritja narrator of this myth concluded
by saying that the native cats:
through raising a sandhill barrier between the Aranda and
themselves...and through causing night to fall on the people
living south of this border, had authorized [them]...to marry
indiscriminately.. .prohibitions on marriage operated only
for the Aranda. (Strehlow 1965, 134)
Strehlow's conclusion from this is that, in the Aboriginal view, these systems of
marriage classes:
were based o n the land itself [emphasis in the original]: for
it was the same wandering horde of ancestral beings which
had validated the 'classless' kin-grouping system of the
Western Desert groups south of the sandhill barrier. ..and
which had instituted the rule that all groups living north
of this barrier had to address one other by [class-] names.
(Strehlow 1965, 134)
This conclusion was very sound as far as it went, and at the time it
represented a real advance over most Europeans' understanding of the Aboriginal
world view, in its emphasis on meaningful features of the landscape as the basis
of the world order. But in light of what we have learned since Strehlow's time
about the links between Aboriginal languages and land, it seems likely that, in
the Western Desert view which is represented in this myth, it is not only the
distinctive Arrernte (Aranda) marriage system that is 'based on the land itself',
but also their language. Indeed, this myth seems to show this at an even greater
level of specificity than the myths from other areas I referred to above.
To this day, Western Arrernte country is linguistically 'mixed' between
the two languages referred to in the myth: all Western Arrernte speakers also
understand the nearby Luritja dialects, and those whose clan countries are near
the Palmer River speak Luritja as well, and often mix in Luritja words when
speaking Arrernte (Diane Austin-Broos, personal communication). The myth would
seem to be establishing a connection between this linguistic mix and the landscape.
As in the other myths, the travelling Dreamtime hero who creates the landscape
switches language at a certain point, and by doing so creates a socially significant
boundary (which in this case he also marks by laying down a series of sandhills).
But rather than switching from one language to another, he switches from one
language to a mixture of two - the same mixture which is still characteristic of
that area.
204 ALAN RUMSEY

Moreover, the myth at least indirectly (through a chain of cause and

effect) relates specific features of the landscape at Ilbirla to its 'mixed' linguistic
identity. Arrernte country, which begins there, is much more well-watered than
the neighbouring Western Desert ('Luritja') area, and its spring-fed rivers grow
the grass that feeds the crickets whose deafening chirps produced the confusion
which caused the native cats to produce a mixed language.
I have dwelt at some length on this central Australian myth partly
because it provides a particularly clear example of the direct link between land
and language in Aboriginal Australia, and of how different it is from the Western
notion of a 'national language'. In the latter, the nation is thought of as, first of
all, a group of people with a common history, common language, and common
territory with which the language is thereby associated. The association between
territory and language is a contingent one, subject to change as one people conquers
or assimilates another.
By contrast, in the Aboriginal myths which associate language and
land, no account at all is taken of people, or peoples. Languages, or even mixtures
of them, are directly placed in the landscape by the founding acts of Dreamtime
heroes. From that point on, the relation between language and territory is a
necessary rather than a contingent one. People too, or their immortal souls, are
similarly grounded in the landscape, in the form of spirit children (or 'conception
spirits') associated with specific sites, and via links through their parents to more
extensive regions. But the languages were already placed in those regions before
any people came on the scene. The links between peoples and languages are
secondary links, established through the grounding of both in the landscape.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CONCLUSION

I wish to thank Diane Austin-Broos and Harold Koch for their advice on aspects
of this chapter; Wilma Merlan and Francesca Merlan for their comments on a draft
of it; and Francesca Merlan for the benefit of our many conversations about land,
language and social identity, and for bringing to my attention the passage from
Strehlow cited here. Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in
Anthropological Forum 6 (l), and we thank its editors for permission to reprint
them here. Thanks also to the many Aboriginal people in Katherine and the
Kimberleys who have discussed these matters with me. I am particularly indebted
to David Mowaljarlai, who in 1976 concisely summed up the point of this chapter
by explaining to me that 'everything goes back to the land'.
LANGUAGE AND TERRITORIALITY 205

FOR DISCUSSION
This chapter is about the way Aborigines formulate the relationships among land,
language and people.
1. To what other aspects of Aboriginal social life might that kind of formulation
be related?
2. Why do you think there are so many different Aboriginal languages?
3. If the idea of the nation-state has led to false assumptions about Aboriginal
social life, what other common Western preconceptions do you think might have
to be overcome in order to understand it better? Do you think it is ever possible
to start trying to understand another culture without any preconceived ideas?
If so, how? If not, is the task a hopeless one? Why or why not?

REFERENCES
Aboriginal Land Commissioner
1981 Finniss River Land Claim, Australian Government Publishing
Service, Canberra.
1982 Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim, Australian Government
Publishing Service, Canberra.
1988 Jawoyn (Katherine Area) Land Claim Australian Government
Publishing Service, Canberra.
Dixon, R.M.W.
1976 Tribes, Languages and other Boundaries in Northeast Queensland.
In N. Peterson (ed), Tribes and Boundaries in Australia, Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 207-38.
Howitt, A.W.
1904 The Native Tribes of Southeast Australia, Macmillan, London.
Keen, I.
1980 Alligator Rivers Stage 11 Land Claim, Northern Land Council,
Darwin.
Laycock, D.
1979 Linguistic Boundaries and Unsolved Problems in Papua New Guinea.
In S. Wurm (ed), New Guinea and Neighbouring Areas: A
Sociolinguistic Laboratory, Mouton, The Hague.
Merlan, F.
1981 Land, Language and Social Identity in Aboriginal Australia, Mankind
13, 133-48.
Merlan, F. and A. Rumsey
1982 The Jawoyn (Katheriw Area) Land Claim, Northern Land Council,
Darwin.
206 ALAN R UMSEY

Milliken, E.P.
1976 Aboriginal Language Distribution in the Northern Territory. In N.
Peterson (ed), Tribes and Boundaries in Australia, Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 239-42.
Myers, F.
1986 Pintubi Country, Pintubi Self, Smithsonian Institution Press,
Washington, and Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.
1930-31 The Social Organization of Australian Tribes, Oceania Monographs,
Sydney.
Spencer, B.
1921 Presidential Address. In Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the
Australian Association for the Advancement of Science.
Strehlow, T.G.H.
1965 Culture, Social Structure and Environment in Aboriginal Central
Australia. In R.M. and C.H. Berndt (eds), Aboriginal Man in
Australia Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
Sutton, P.
1978 Wik: Aboriginal Society, Territory and Language at Cape Keerweer,
Cape York Peninsula, Australia, PhD thesis, University of Queensland.
Sutton, P. and A. Palmer
1981 Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim, Northern Land Council,
Darwin.
Tindale, N.
1974 Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, University of California Press, Los
Angeles.
Trigger, D.
1987 Languages, Linguistic Groups and Status Relations at Doomadgee, an
Aboriginal Settlement in North-West Queensland, Australia, Oceania
57, 217-38.
Warner, W. L.
1964 A Black Civilization, Harper and Row, New York.
Woodward, J.
1974 Aboriginal Land Rights Commission Second Report, Australian
Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
 CHAPTER

NEW USES

OLD LANGUAGES

Paul Black

INTRODUCTION

T he Australian television series Unknown Australia recently spoke of the

Northern Territory as being 'where an ancient people cling to a way of life
40,000 years old.' For some reason many Australians like to think of Aboriginal
people in just this way, even though most are now wearing Western clothes, living
in Western-style houses, and participating to a great extent in a Western-style
economy. It would be just as fair to characterise non-Aboriginal Australians as
'clinging' to ways of life one or two thousand years old, at least, because many
of their social, political, and religious practices go back that far - and we seldom
know for sure which Aboriginal practices go back much further than this.
As the Aboriginal writer Colin Johnson (1985,Zl) put it, the notion of:
a stone-age culture (static and unchanging) is a myth
created by those who should have known better and still
put forth by those who should know better. All societies
and cultures change and adapt, and this is fact not theory.
As Aboriginal lifestyles change, Aboriginal languages must change with them or
they will increasingly be put aside in favour of a language that can cope with the
new circumstances.
This may seem to make language and culture maintenance a paradox:
what can it mean to 'maintain' something that must either change or go out of
use? We'll return to this question at the end of this chapter, after considering in
more detail what it means for Aboriginal languages to adapt to new uses.

THE NEW USES AND THEIR EFFECTS

Many Aboriginal languages have already died out, of course, but those still spoken
in dozens of communities across northern and central Australia are being used
for a variety of new purposes. The language situation at Kintore, in the Northern
Territory, seems typical. As described by Amery (1986, 15-18), the local
PintupiILuritja language is used not only in connection with more traditional
activities, such as hunting, ceremonies, and everyday camp life, but also in the
local clinic, school, church and store, for council meetings, card playing, and
discussing Aboriginal art business, and even for long-distance communication over
208 PAUL BLACK

two-way radio. In such locations as Alice Springs Aboriginal languages have also
been used in broadcast radio for over a decade and are being used in videos and
for occasional television broadcasts.
Such new uses can actually affect the language itself. Most obviously
they often require new vocabulary. They can also involve new discourse patterns
and may require the relatively new medium of writing, and this can have less
obvious effects on the structure of the language.
Let's consider some examples. Clinics in many communities now depend
heavily on Aboriginal health workers, who generally interact with patients in the
local language. Amery (1986, 23-24) notes that this not only involves much new
vocabulary relating to diseases and treatments but also that it can lead to less
traditional patterns of interaction as the health workers adopt Western practices
in asking more direct questions in taking a medical history.
Local government meetings often deal with Western institutions and
resource management, and they may thus bring new topics and vocabulary to the
community. The pattern of discourse may also be somewhat different. As a specific
example, a few years ago there was a day-long meeting in Galiwin'ku (on Elcho
Island) about whether tourism should be introduced to the island. The meeting
was held in a public area outdoors, with the audience strung out in quite a wide
circle. Speakers took turns coming to a microphone in the centre of the circle and
stating their case for or against tourism. There was little or no interaction with
the audience, which did not, for example, ask questions. The meeting was not run
in a Western style, but there clearly were some less traditional elements, such as
the use of the microphone. And a t the end, a few people circulated around the
audience to record people's vote on whether or not they wanted the proposed
tourist facilities - surely not a traditional practice.
Church services in Aboriginal communities are often partly in English
and partly in the local language. When I attended a Catholic mass on Bathurst
Island, for example, much of the liturgy was in English, but the sermon was
delivered in the local Tiwi language. (The speaker referred to written notes,
whether in English or Tiwi.) The hymns were also in Tiwi, and to aid the memory
an overhead projector was used to project the written lyrics against a wall in a
front corner of the church. The hymns, some scripture and other church literature
are also available in book form. Prayers are sometimes also said in Tiwi. In Wadeye
(formerly Port Keats) people use the local Murrinh-Patha language for prayer both
at mass - where Yile dingarrayepup kathu is the local equivalent of 'Lord hear
our prayer' - and more privately (Brother Vince Roche, personal communication).
The literature and the oral sermons, hymns and prayers represent new genres of
language use, although some of them (such as sermons) may well be similar to
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 209

more traditional genres. They also involve many new concepts as well as expressions
that become endowed with special meaning, such as Koko-Bera we?-?- wetharr,
the 'good news' of t h e gospel.
Broadcasting is quite different from other language use in Aboriginal
settings in that the broadcaster cannot see the listeners, or generally even be sure
who is listening. It is thus very different from talking to a group of friends or
relatives. Since the broadcaster can't be sure how much the audience already
knows, and since they can't ask for clarification, the language needs to be relatively
decontextualised, that is, self-contained. Broadcasting can also cover a wide variety
of topics, whether relatively traditional or modern, and the latter may involve
the use of new vocabulary. Because it can reach so many people, broadcasting
can actually play a crucial role in promoting new vocabulary and language
standards in general; see Poulson, Ross, Shopen, and Toyne (1986). Broadcasting
can also make use of writing, such as for notes on news or announcements.
In school programs the role of Aboriginal languages can vary from being
the object of study for a hour or two per week to being one of the main media
of instruction, normally along with English, in what is a bilingual program. We'll

Plate 6: Examples of notices, Ernabella, 1988. Left is an announcement of

coming Bible Translation Workshop, and right is a notice from the clinic telling
people not to use too much paper lest the toilet block up (reproduced from
Australian Aboriginal Studies 1990lnumber 2).
210 PAUL BLACK

consider bilingual programs at some length because of their impact on the children
and hence the transmission of culture, and also because some readers may wonder
if their benefits justify their cost.

THE CASE OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION

Some thirty bilingual programs have been operating in recent years in Aboriginal
communities in northern and central Australia. The following list is based on Bubb
(1990) for Northern Territory communities and on Black (1983) and M. Gale
(1990) for programs in other locations (and see Map 10).
Language Locations (and year started)
Arrernte (Aranda) Yipirinya School in Alice Springs (1983),
Ltyentye Purte (Santa Teresa, NT) (1989)
Burarra Maningrida, NT (1986)
Dhuwaya and others Yirrkala, NT (1974)
Djambarrpuyngu Galiwin'ku, NT (1974)
Gupapuyngu Milingimbi, NT (1973)
Kukatja Balgo Hills, WA (about 1987)
Luritja Haasts Bluff (1974), M'Bunghara (1981),
Papunya (1984), Watiyawanu, NT (1981)
Manyjiljarra Strelley, WA
Maung Warruwi, NT (1973)
Murrinh-Patha Wadeye, NT (1976)
Ndjebbana Maningrida, NT (1981)
Ngaanyatjarra Warburton, WA (mid-1970s only)
Nyangumarta Strelley, WA
PintupiILuritja Walungurru, NT (1983)
Pitjantjatjara Ernabella and other S.A. communities
(since the 1960s), Areyonga (1973) and
Docker River, NT (1979), Yipirinya School
in Alice Springs (1983)
Thayorre Edward River, Qld (discontinued)
Tiwi Nguiu, NT (1974)
Walmajarri Noonkanbah, WA (briefly after 1980)
Warlpiri Lajamanu (1982), Nyirrpi (1986), Willowra
(1977), Yuendumu, NT (1974)
Wik-Mungkan Aurukun, Qld (suspended)
Nowadays bilingual education is often thought to be important for local
language maintenance, but most of the programs were in fact started in order to
improve the general education of the children. In most programs children begin
schooling in their own language but over the next few years are taught increasingly
in English, which typically comes to be used more than the local language by grade
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 211

School System Languages

Northern Territory
1 Manmgnda government Burarra. Ndjebbana
2 St Therese's Catholic Tfwi
3 0 L S.H. Wadeye Catholic Murnnh-Patha
Wamw government Maung
Galiwin'ku government Djambarrpuyngu
Milingimbi government Gupapuyngu
Yirrkala government Dhuwaya and dialects
Barunga government Knol
Lajamanu government Wart pin
Yuendumu government Warlpiri
Nyirrpi government Wartpin
Wiliowra government Warlpiri
Areyonga government Pttjantjatjara
Docker River government Pitlant1atjara
Yipfnnya ndependent Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte, Luntja
Santa Teresa Cathohc Arrernte
Papunya government Luntla
Watiyawanu government Luntja
M'Bunghara government Luntja
Haasts Bluff government Luntla
Walungurru government PintupdLuntja

South Australia
22 government
23 government
24 government
25 Fregon government
Mimil~ government
lndulkana government
Kenmore government
Ya1ata government

Western Auslraiia
30 independent Nyangumarta, (Warnman)
31 ndependent Manliljacra, (Warnman)
32 Catholic Djaru

Catholic Kukatla

Map 10: Location of bilingual educations schools (after Schmidt 1990).

212 PAUL BLACK

four. After less than a decade of operation, some such programs were indeed found
to be more successful, in general academic terms, than the English-only programs
that they replaced (Gale, McClay, Christie and Harris, 1981; Murtagh, 1980).
The reasons for the effectiveness of bilingual education are not hard
to imagine. Most obviously, it's much easier for children to learn in a language
they understand than in one that they don't (see also Macnamara 1967). They can
begin developing important academic skills, such as reading and writing, even
before they are ready to learn much through the medium of spoken English. Many
of the fundamentals they learn transfer readily to their later studies in English.
In the area of literacy, for example, these fundamentals include such basics as
the fact that books, unlike people, always 'tell the same story,' and that we read
from left to right and from top to bottom. They also include most of the letters
and punctuation required for English.
A well-designed and properly staffed bilingual program can also make
the students considerably more comfortable and confident about attending school
(see also Cummins 1986). Even the fact that the local language is being used in
written form can be a source of pride, allowing people to say, 'Now we are the
same as white people - we can write our own language too' (Leeding, 1984, 11).
On the other hand, to be confined to interaction in an alien language can be stifling:
the missionaries didn't realise that when they stopped us
speaking Yolngu [that is, Aboriginal] language in the school,
they were stopping our way of thinking. How could we use
our Yolngu thinking if school was run by Balanda [that is,
Europeans] with Balanda language? (Yunupingu 1989, 1).
As this passage suggests, the benefits of effective bilingual education
come not just from the use of the local language in school but also from who is
there to use it. Such programs tend to depend on employing local people in
professional capacities, at least as teaching assistants and literacy workers, but
increasingly also as teachers and principals. This helps make both the children
and the local community feel that the school is something of their own, rather
than an alien and perhaps colonial institution. As Wunungmurra (1989, 13) says,
Yolngu [that is, Aboriginal people] must own the school
program. Without this we will feel crushed and lose our
self respect and self identity - we will be living on other
people's programs like it was in the past, in the mission days.
Bilingual programs involve uses of Aboriginal language that differ
considerably from traditional uses. The subject matter taught in the language often
requires the development of new vocabulary. This includes some words required
largely for academic purposes alone, such as ones relating to written language
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 213

(for example, 'letter', 'sentence', 'full stop') and mathematical concepts and
processes (for example, 'minus', 'fraction', 'set'). Furthermore, the teacher-pupil
relationship can involve quite different patterns of oral language use than is
otherwise normal in the community, and the development of a written version
of the language tends to be especially important. Let's consider the discourse
patterning and writing at more length before examining ways in which new
vocabulary can arise.

DISCOURSE PATTERNING
Western-style schooling provides an especially fertile environment for speakers
of Aboriginal languages to interact quite differently in their languages than they
have in the past. Even in Western society the patterns of verbal interaction in
schools tend to be rather different from those in non-school situations. Since
teachers are expected to be in control of their classes, students are generally not
allowed to talk whenever they wish, and in many circumstances they are expected
to direct their talk only to the teacher, rather than to other students. Often the
teacher-directed talk also falls into a 'question-answer-evaluation' pattern of
exchange that is unusual outside of schools. Consider this example:
Teacher: What's the capital of South Australia? Ken?
Student: Adelaide.
Teacher: Right!
Outside of classrooms (or quiz programs) we don't normally ask such 'display'
questions - that is, ones for which we already know the answer. To the extent
that Aboriginal teachers follow such Western practices in their own teaching they
may be deviating even more severely from the normal patterns of exchange in
their languages, where even an attempt to gain answers that one does not already
know may involve less direct questioning than we might use in English. See also
Eades's comments on questioning in chapter 13 of this book, and also Harris (1990,
38-39).
Some other new patterns (or genres) of oral language were mentioned
earlier, including hymns and prayers in church and the way Aboriginal health
workers are coming to take medical histories. Some of these may be similar to more
traditional genres, of course. For example, sermons and radio broadcasts are new
to Aboriginal languages, but there were traditional situations in which people
similarly spoke in a kind of 'broadcast' mode, rather than to particular individuals.
Among the Koko-Bera (of western Cape York Peninsula) for example, such a
broadcast mode was used as certain preparations were carried out following a
person's death. One elder would have the responsibility of speaking out, to nobody
2 14 PAUL BLACK

in particular, on the relevant obligations and taboos, such as how people should
not visit the part of the country owned by the deceased. This was called puth-
kun whhirrm - essentially 'carrying the country of the deceased' and translated
into the local English as 'preaching'.
The new uses of Aboriginal language may lead not only to new patterns
of exchange but also to changes in the way in which respect and avoidance are
signalled in language. People normally adjust their speech to suit the relationship
between them and the other participants; in English this is what makes the
difference between such pairs of sentences as "hut up!' and 'Could you please
be quiet?'. Relative age is often an important factor in this, and in English such
factors as social position and occupation can also be important: we tend to speak
in a different way to our doctor than to a taxi driver, for example. In Aboriginal
cultures, on the other hand, how people speak to each other, and indeed whether
they can speak to each other at all, has usually depended heavily on how they
are related or classified as kin; see Alpher's discussion in chapter 7.
Consider what this means in relation to schooling. In a Western-style
school an Aboriginal teacher may have to accept responsibilities over a class that
are not in accord with expectations based on kinship. Aboriginal teachers
undoubtedly find ways of coping with the situation, and it may also be that children
of primary school age are not really expected to have mastered the appropriate
ways to talk to and behave towards various kin. In any case, however, the school
environment certainly provides more support for learning Western-style role
relationships - for example, teacher-student - than it does for mastering the
kinship obligations.
It's thus not surprising that children do not seem to be mastering the
appropriate behaviour towards kin in some communities. In both Kowanyama (on
Cape York Peninsula) and Nguiu (on Bathurst Island), for example, I have heard
certain children described as exceptional precisely because of how conscientious
they were about following the more traditional rules of behaviour. In addition,
it seems typical for special 'respect' forms of Aboriginal languages to go out of
use much more quickly than the language as a whole. Undoubtedly such changes
are promoted by a variety of changes in lifestyle and not solely by schooling.

THE IMPACT OF WRITING

One of the most striking new uses for Aboriginal and Islander languages is their
use in written form. As mentioned elsewhere in this book, some languages began
to be written quite early in colonial times (as for example in the dictionary of the
Adelaide language described by Simpson in chapter 9). But for many Aboriginal
languages, a written form has come only since the late 1960s or early 1970s.
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 215

Much Aboriginal language writing has been for the purposes of early
primary education in bilingual programs. This includes the preparation of primers,
story books and other classroom material, as well as the writing of the children
themselves. As noted earlier, this first language literacy has important academic
and motivational benefits regardless of whether literacy in the language has any
real functions outside the school. In some communities, nonetheless, Aboriginal
language literacy is gradually coming to be used for a variety of purposes, ranging
from occasional public notices to scripture and hymn books in church and
sometimes even well-read newsletters in the community at large (see Rhydwen's
comments in chapter 11, and also Goddard 1990).
The introduction of literacy to a previously non-literate culture can
have tremendous consequences. Writing is more than just a representation of
spoken language: it is a tool for doing new things, such as communicating over
distance or time and keeping records for posterity or simply to jog one's own
memory. Nowadays such electronic devices as the telephone, radio, and tape
recorder let us do many of the same things with spoken language, and yet all larger
societies around the world still rely heavily on writing. It is a powerful medium,
and it is thus accorded a special status in many societies. Western societies value
written contracts over oral promises, for example, and the idea that the written
word is safer or stronger than the spoken is a compelling one.
One may thus wonder about the effects of literacy on Aboriginal
cultures, and whether it can cause changes in lifestyle or ways of thinking that
people might someday regret. Two things make this somewhat an ideal question,
however. Firstly, whether or not Aboriginal people become literate in their own
languages, Australian schooling aims to ensure their literacy in English, and it seems
clear that the effects of this literacy will not somehow be confined to some 'English'
corner of the brain. Secondly, literacy is only one of a number of factors, including
schooling and urbanisation, that are known to affect thought patterns; see the
excellent study by Scribner and Cole (1981) for evidence on these matters.
It has sometimes been suggested that a reliance on literacy may inhibit
oral storytelling and thus interfere with the oral transmission of traditional stories.
One may well be left with this impression by seeing young Aboriginal adults who
have been schooled in the written language seek out written versions of traditional
stories because they have not learned to tell the story properly themselves. But
it is clear that oral traditions are also being lost in communities that have never
had the benefit of literacy in their own languages or in some cases even in English,
as I found during research on Kurtjar and Koko-Bera languages and traditions in
southwestern Cape York Peninsula. It is not literacy that is killing off oral traditions.
216 PAUL BLACK

Since written and spoken language serve different functions, they often
come to be noticeably different in structure and vocabulary, and written language
also tends to be somewhat more conservative than speech. One might imagine
that the conservatism would require many decades to develop, but in fact it has
already begun to appear in written languages that are less than twenty years old.
On Bathurst Island, for example, the school uses a much more conservative form
of the local Tiwi language than the children actually speak (Black 1990b, 82).
Similarly, younger Yolngu Matha speakers in Yirrkala are certainly writing a more
conservative form of the language than the so-called 'Baby Gumatj' (or Dhuwaya)
many of them actually speak (see Amery forthcoming). Cataldi (1990,84) has noted
how a similar conservatism in written Warlpiri in Lajamanu can be seen as a positive
factor in support of language maintenance.

Plate 7: Desmond Taylor recording and transcribing Warnman stories with his
father Waka Taylor at the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in 1989 (photo-
graph by Nicholas Thieberger).
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 217

SOURCES FOR NEW VOCABULARY

As we noted earlier, using Aboriginal languages in new ways often requires new
vocabulary: words for products and prices in the local shop, for medicines and
treatments in the clinic, for the processes and subject matter of education in the
school, and so on. English is similarly gaining new words and expressions all the
time. When Europeans first came to live in Australia, for example, they borrowed
such words as billabong and boomerang, and coined such others as paperbark
and platypus, in order to talk about their new situation and experiences. In the
same way the Aboriginal people borrowed or coined words for things that were
old in Western culture but new to theirs, such as types of food, drink and clothing.
Since that time both English and Aboriginal languages have also gained new words
for a variety of innovations that we take for granted today, such as the aeroplane,
electricity, motor vehicle, radio, refrigerator, telephone and television. People
sometimes take such things to represent change in Aboriginal traditions without
noting that they represent change in Western traditions as well.
New vocabulary can be produced from the resources of the language
itself or it can be borrowed from other languages. The simplest version of the former
is to 'extend' the meaning of an existing word to cover a new concept, just as the
meaning of English 'bonnet' was extended to refer to the engine cover of a car.
A well-known Aboriginal example is the use of the word for 'ghost' or 'spirit' (for
example, kardiya in west central Northern Territory, mdnpich in Koko-Bera) to
refer also to white people. Other examples include the extension of Kurtjar mook
'bone' to mean 'wheel', of Yolngu Matha makirri or buthuru 'ears' to refer to the
dots above the Yolngu Matha letter a (which represents long aa), and of Tiwi
yinjanga 'name' to also mean 'number'.
New vocabulary can also be created as a combination of old elements.
One possibility is to extend an old word to cover a new meaning, as described above,
but also to qualify the word by another whenever necessary to distinguish the
new meaning from the old. Thus, the Kurtjar originally referred to horses as ruaak
'dog@)' or more distinctively as ruaak ngkuaath 'big dog(s)', and to sugar as
loongkird 'sand' or more precisely as maay loongkird 'sand food'. Another
possibility is to make a compound expression in which both (or all) elements must
always occur. Thus, the Warumungu of central Australia came to refer to the rabbit
as kuwartajunmarn 'long ears' (Simpson 1985, 16). It's also possible to derive
new vocabulary by adding affixes to familiar words, as in Warumungu jina-kari
(foot-belong)for 'shoe', warli-kari (thigh-belong) for 'trousers', and kunupa-jangu
(dog-having) for 'Greyhound bus' (Simpson 1985, 15).
Aboriginal languages have also drawn on English (or in some cases an
English-based pidgin or creole) for much new vocabulary: for example,
218 PAUL BLACK

Pitjantjatjara rayipula 'rifle', mutuka 'motor car', turawutja 'trousers', tjaata

'shirt', and pulangkita 'blanket' (Amery 1986, 19). As these examples show, the
words are often pronounced in a way which conforms to the normal sound pattern
of the language but which is rather different from the original English
pronunciation.
English is not the only source of borrowing. Languages generally tend
to borrow occasional words from their neighbours, and in Australia these have
sometimes been words for newly introduced concepts. For example, Warumungu
murrkkarti 'hat' seems to have originally come from the Kaurna language, far
to the south (Simpson 1985, 19). The languages along the coast of Arnhem Land
have also borrowed words from the Macassan language of Indonesia in the past
few hundred years: for example, Yolngu Mathajorra' 'paper', and rrupiya 'money'.
Speakers of some languages are anxious to keep their languages as free
of foreign influences as possible. Thus, the Germans went through a period of
casting out words derived from Latin or Greek, such as hydrogen, and replacing
them by Germanic compounds, in this case wasserstoff (that is, 'water-stuff'). The
French have also legislated against the use of foreign vocabulary. Some Torres Strait
Islanders I have worked with have also been concerned about keeping their
languages as pure as possible by building new vocabulary out of traditional
elements. At the same time speakers of languages as diverse as English, Albanian,
Filipino and Japanese have happily borrowed some fifty per cent or more of their
vocabularies from various other languages - notably French, Latin, and Greek
in the case of English. The fact that such a 'mongrel' language as English grew
from the speech of a sometime colonised island to a language of international
importance demonstrates that borrowing itself is not a threat to the existence of
a language. Language 'purity' is largely a matter of personal, or societal, preference.

THE PARADOX OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE MAINTENANCE

Nowadays many people are concerned with maintaining Aboriginal cultures and
languages; see for example Devlin (1990), Schmidt (1990) and McConveU (1991).
However, this can't mean 'freezing' the culture or language at some point in time,
whether at the time of first European contact or at the present. As a culture or
language stops keeping up with the changes in daily life it becomes increasingly
less useful and less likely to survive. To 'maintain' a culture or language it seems
that you often have to let it change or even help it change. As Poulson, Ross, Shopen
and Toyne (1986, 7) note, 'A major aspect of cultural maintenance is the adaptation
of language to talking about new things'.
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 2 19

If cultures and languages must change, however, what does it mean

to 'maintain' them? As Harris (1990, 39-44) points out, Aboriginal culture will
change, but it need not lose its distinctiveness. Perhaps one can identify a variety
of characteristics that are currently distinctive of Aboriginal culture, as Harris
(1990, 21-39) does. But which characteristics are important to maintain is a matter
for Aboriginal people to work out among themselves. lb a great extent, cultural
demise is simply cultural change that is unwanted by the people involved, perhaps
often because it is forced upon them from outside (see Black 1990b).
Aboriginal people certainly seem happy to absorb many Western ideas
into their cultures, as long as they do it on their own terms. With respect to
education Wali Wunungmurra (1989, 12-13) pointed out that Aboriginal and
Western knowledge
will only come together if there is respect for our
knowledge and where Aboriginal people are taking the
initiative, where we shape and develop the educational
programs and then implement them. In other words Yolngu
[that is, Aboriginal people] must own the school program.
However Aboriginal people decide to maintain their cultures, their languages will
have to remain in step if they hope to maintain them too. For promoting language
maintenance, Fishman (1987, 14-15) stresses the importance of making sure that
it is used in all primary aspects of daily life, such as the home, the school and
the workplace, and to whatever extent possible even to promote its use in the
'secondary institutions of intergenerational mother tongue continuity'; see also
Black (1990a). As McConvell (1984, 51-52) puts it, the language should
grow in the hands of Aboriginal people themselves, to
challenge the domination of English not in everything, but
in the situations [in which] the people themselves feel
capable of putting up the alternative.

FOR DISCUSSION
1. The chapter focuses on Aboriginal languages, but many other languages also
develop new uses with the passing of time. How many new uses of English can
you think of that have developed within the last century or two? As starters you
might consider where these bits of English are from: (a) Roger, over and out; (b)
Number please; (c) And now a word from our sponsor. As these examples may
suggest, you can also consider to what extent the new uses have given rise to
distinctive patterns of speech.
220 PAUL BLACK

2. One reason given for having bilingual education is that people learn better
in their first language. Even so, many children throughout the world have had
to get their schooling through a second language. Sometimes they seem to do this
quite successfully, one known case being children of English-speaking background
studying through French in Quebec. Can you see reasons why the status of the
language of instruction - as a 'mainstream' or minority language in the community
- might tend to affect students' success in studying through the medium of that
language?
3. The chapter says that writing is 'more' than just a representation of spoken
language, but this should not be to suggest that spoken language is any less
important than writing. List as many things as you can that are (a) best done
through speech, and (b) best done through writing. For example, to which list would
you add (1) communicating in the dark, and (2) stating a complicated mathematical
formula? Think about the properties of speech and writing that cause you to add
each item to one list or the other.
4. With regard to the relation between literacy and thought patterns, some
scholars have claimed that that there are actually deep psychological differences
between literate and non-literate people, although Scribner and Cole (1981,
251-525) found no evidence that this was so. What sorts of evidence might one
hope to find to confirm or reject such a possibility?
5. The chapter claims that borrowing should not be considered a threat to
languages. Some scholars would disagree, and they might point out that the
situation of Aboriginal languages is far different from such international languages
as English. What arguments can you find for and against such a view?

REFERENCES
Amery, R.
1986 Languages in Contact: The Case of Kintore and Papunya (with
Particular Reference to the Health Domain), Language in Aboriginal
Australia 1, 13-38.
forth-
coming An Australian Koine: Dhuwaya, a Variety of Yolngu Matha Spoken
at Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land. In International Journal
of the Sociology of Language.
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 221

Black, P.
1983 Aboriginal Languages of the north er)^ Tkrritory,School of Australian
Linguistics, Darwin Community College, Batchelor, NT.
1990a Rethinking Domain Theory, Part I: How Should It Be Applied?,
Ngoonjook 3, 22-32.
1990b Some Competing Goals in Aboriginal Language Planning. In R.B.
Baldauf (Jr) and A. Luke (eds), Language Planning and Education
in Australasia and the South Pacific, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon,
80-88.
Bubb, P.
1990 Information on Bilingual Programs and Personnel, NT Bilingual
Newsletter 90-1, 6-9.
Cataldi, L.
1990 Language Maintenance and Bilingual Education at Lajamanu School.
In C. Walton and W. Eggington (eds), Language: Maintenance, Power
and Education in Australian Aboriginal Contexts, NTU Press,
Darwin, 83-87.
Cummins, J.
1986 Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention,
Harvard Educational Review 56, 18-37.
Devlin, B.
1990 Some Issues Related to Vernacular Language Maintenance: A
Northern Territory View. In C. Walton and W. Eggington (eds),
Language: Maintenance, Power and Education in Australian
Aboriginal Contexts, NTU Press, Darwin, 53-74.
Fishman, J.A.
1987 Language Spread and Language Policy for Endangered Languages.
In P.H. Lowenberg (ed.), Language Spread and Language Policy:
Issues, Implications and Case Studies, Georgetown University Press,
Washington, 1-15.
Gale, K., D. McClay, M. Christie and S. Harris
1981 Academic Achievement in the Milingimbi Bilingual Education
Program, TESOL Qu,arterly 15, 297-314.
Gale, M.
1990 A Review of Bilingual Education in Aboriginal Austra1ia.h Australian
Review of Applied Linguistics 13(1), 40-80.
Goddard, C.
1990 Emergent Genres of Reportage and Advocacy in the Pitjantjatjara
Print Media, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1990(2), 227-47.
222 PAUL BLACK

Harris, S.
1990 Two-way Aboriginal Schooling: Western Education and the Survival
of a Small Culture, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Haviland, J.B.
1979 How to Talk to Your Brother-in-law in Guugu Yimidhirr. In T. Shopen
(ed), Languages a n d Their Speakers, Winthrop, Cambridge, MA,
160-239.
Johnson, C. [Mudrooroo Narogin]
1985 White Forms, Aboriginal Content. In J. Davis and B. Hodge (eds),
Aboriginal Writing Tbday, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
Canberra, 21-30.
Leeding, V.
1984 Loanwords: Ours or Theirs? In G.R. McKay and B.A. Sommer (eds),
Further Applications of Linguistics to Australian Aboriginal
Contexts, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Parkville, Vic,
7-16.
Macnamara, J.
1967 The Effects of Instruction in a Weaker Language, Journal of Social
Issues, 23(2), 121-35.
McConvell, P.
1984 Domains and Domination, NT Bilingual Education Newsletter 1-2,
48-52.
1991 Understanding Language Shift: A Step towards Language
Maintenance. In S. Romaine fed),Language i n Australia, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 143-55.
Murtagh, E.J.
1980 Creole and English Used as Languages of Instruction with Aboriginal
Australians [microfilm], PhD thesis, Stanford University, University
Microfilms, Ann Arbor MI.
Poulson, C.J., T.N. Ross, T. Shopen and P. Toyne
1986 Warlpiri Language and Culture: Adaptation to Contemporary Needs,
Language i n Aboriginal Australia 1, 7-12.
Schmidt, A.
1990 The Loss of Australia's Aboriginal Language Heritage, Aboriginal
Studies Press, Canberra.

Scribner, S. and M. Cole

1981 ThePsychology of Literacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Simpson, J.
1985 How Warumungu People Express New Concepts, Lawiage i n Central
Australia 4. 12-25.
NEW USES FOR OLD LANGUAGES 223

Wunungmurra, W.
1989 'Dhawurrpunaramirri': Finding the Common Ground for a New
Aboriginal Curriculum, Ngoonjook 2, 12-16.
Yunupingu, M.
1989 Language and Power: The Yolngu Rise to Power at Yirrkala School,
Ngoonjook 2, 1-6.

NOTE
I am grateful to Br Vince Roche for information on prayer in Aboriginal languages
and to Rob Amery, Mary-Anne Gale, Stephen Harris, Patrick McConvell, my wife
Tina, and my daughter Barbara for taking the trouble to read and comment on
this chapter.
224 LANGUAGES AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

CONTRIBUTORS

BARRY ALPHER has recently been an editor for Mouton de Gruyter publishers
in Berlin. He has taught linguistics and anthropology for varying periods at Arizona
State University, the School of Australian Linguisticsin Darwin, Sydney University,
the State University of New York a t Albany, and Cornell University; has acted as
Head of the School of Australian Linguistics; has done applied linguistics in the
employ of the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards in Denver; has worked
with Puerto Rican migrant labourers at the Labor Education Center, Rutgers
University, New Jersey; and acted as consultant in Aboriginal land claim work
in Central Australia. He has compiled one of the most comprehensive dictionaries
of an Australian language: Yir-Yoront Lexicon: Sketch and Dictionary of a n
Australian Language (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 1991).
EDITH BAVIN is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at La Trobe University. She
received her PhD in linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo
in 1980. Since moving to Australia in 1981, her primary research has been in cross-
linguistic aspects of first language acquisition, in particular the acquisition of
Warlpiri. Edith is currently doing cross-linguistic research with children from a
number of linguistic backgrounds, as well as writing a book on first language
acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective. Other research interests include
the West Nilotic languages, and also language change.

PAUL BLACK is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the Education Faculty

of Northern Territory University. An American by birth, he came to Australia in
1974 after receiving a Yale doctorate involving linguistic research in Ethiopia.
Before assuming his current position in 1990 he worked as a research fellow and
later a linguistic archivist for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra, and then spent eight years working with
Aboriginal literacy workers, interpreters and teachers at the former School of
Australian Linguistics (in Batchelor, Northern Territory). From 1991 to early 1993
he was a visiting lecturer in English a t Waseda University in Tbkyo.

MICHAEL CHRISTIE is a Senior Lecturer in Adult Education at the Northern

Territory University. He has a mixed academic background. He majored in English
and History but concentrated for his doctoral degree on race relations between
Aborigines and colonists in early Victoria. Since then he has worked as an English
language teacher (while travelling), as a freelance writer, a potter and a university
lecturer. During 1991 he was a guest lecturer in the English Department at
Stockholm University.
CONTRIBUTORS 225

TERRY CROWLEY gained his PhD at the Australian National University, and now
lectures in linguistics at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and before
this he taught at the University of the South Pacific and the University of Papua
New Guinea. His current research interests cover Pacific pidgins and creoles,
concentrating on Melanesian Pidgin, as well as Oceanic languages. He has also
published on the Aboriginal languages of northern New South Wales, as well as
Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland.

DIANA EADES has been working with speakers of Aboriginal English since 1973,
mainly in Queensland and New South Wales. She is particularly interested in how
Aboriginal culture is continued in the way that Aboriginal people use English.
In recent years she has applied her research to a number of areas of cross-cultural
communication, particularly in education and the law. Currently she lectures in
linguistics at the University of New England, Armidale.

JOHN HARRIS spent many years teaching in Aboriginal communities in the

Northern Territory. His doctoral studies dealt with the origin of Kriol. He is now
Warden of New College at the University of New South Wales. He is the author
of One Blood, 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of
Hope (Albatross, Sydney, 1990) the award-winning history of Aborigines and the
Christian Church.

MAR1 RHYDWEN is completing her PhD thesis on Kriol literacy at Sydney

University. In 1992 she completed a report on the extent of the use of Kriol in
the Northern Territory and its implications for access to English literacy. She has
worked for several years on Kriol and Aboriginal English in the Northern Territory.

ALAN RUMSEY is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney.

He is interested in the relationship between language and other aspects of social
life, and has been studying Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western
Australia since 1975.

MARGARET SHARPE lectures in sociolinguistics in the Department of Aboriginal

and Multicultural Studies, University of New England. She has spent her academic
life studying the Alawa and Bundjalung languages of the Northern Territory,
northern New South Wales and southern Queensland; Kriol in the Northern
Territory; and Aboriginal English in Queensland, Alice Springs and northern New
South Wales. Since 1979 she has published three monographs and numerous articles
and chapters on these languages, and a children's novel based on her research
in these areas.
226 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

JANE SIMPSON is presently teaching at the University of Sydney and is working

on dictionaries of Kaurna and Warumungu. She has participated in the Warlpiri
Dictionary Project and in establishing an archive of machine-readabledictionaries
at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander Studies. She
is the author of Warlpiri Morpho-Syntax: A Leocicalist Approach (Kluwer 1991).

JAKY TROY has concentrated her research in the area of language contact in
Australia since 1788. In 1985 she completed a BA (Hons)at the University of Sydney
in linguistic anthropology. Her thesis focused on early language contact in New
South Wales, and was later published in a revised form as: Australian Aboriginal
Contact with the English Language in New South Wales: 1788 to 1845 (Pacific
Linguistics, B-103. Canberra 1990). She is currently completing a PhD in the
Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University.

MICHAEL WALSH teaches linguistics and Aboriginal studies at the University of

Sydney. He has carried out fieldwork on Aboriginal languages along the west coast
of the Northern Territory since 1972. He has also provided anthropological
documentation for a long-running land claim near Darwin.

COLJN YALLOP teaches English and linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney.

He has done linguistic field work in Central Australia and is the author of
Australian Aboriginal Languages (Andre Deutsch, 1982).