The Languages and Linguistics of Australia

A Comprehensive Guide

Harold Koch, Rachel Nordlinger, Harold Koch, Rachel Nordlinger

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9783110395129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation.

Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed.

Part I Traditional Indigenous languages of Australia

Harold Koch and Rachel Nordlinger

1 The languages of Australia in linguistic research: context and issues

1 Background on the Indigenous languages of Australia

At the time of colonisation in the late 18^th century, Australia was home to 700–800 language varieties, distributed across the continent (and including Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islands), which can be grouped into more than 250 distinct languages, some of which include a number of dialects.¹,² These language varieties were spoken across a population of around one million people (e.g. Butlin 1983), which indicates the enormous linguistic diversity of Indigenous Australia. In many cases small populations (e.g. 40–50 people) maintained distinctive language varieties, and the largest populations speaking a single language variety were probably no bigger than 3000–4000 people. Linguistic diversity was not necessarily an impediment to communication, however, since Indigenous societies were frequently highly multilingual, with an individual oft en speaking up to 4–6 languages of the surrounding area. Linguistic diversity, in fact, was valued for its indexical relationship to identity and group membership (Evans 2007).

The relationship between language and identity is strong for all human societies, but is particularly so in Indigenous Australia, where language is oft en related directly to the land. As Rumsey (1993, 2005) explains, in Australia there is a direct relationship between a language and a tract of land; in creation myths it is very common for the ancestors to be described as passing across the land instilling different languages into different areas as they go (Evans 2007: 20). People are then connected to a particular tract of land and, through that connection, to the language associated with that place. Thus the Wambaya people are Wambaya because they are linked to places which are associated with the Wambaya language, and therefore speak Wambaya (see Rumsey 1993, 2005 for discussion). This ideology leads to an important distinction between speaking a language and “owning” a language. A person will “own” the language of the land to which her clan, family or group is connected, even if she doesn’t speak it.

Unfortunately, the 225 years since colonisation have taken a devastating toll on the traditional Indigenous languages of Australia. Of the 250 or more distinct languages spoken in 1788, only 15–18 are now being learned by children as their first language. Another 100 or so have only small numbers of elderly speakers remaining, and most have no full or fluent speakers left at all (Marmion, Obata and Troy 2014). Australia has been identified as the country that has experienced the greatest and most rapid loss of languages over the last century, of anywhere in the world (Nettle and Romaine 2000: 9), with grim estimates suggesting that if recent trends of language shift remain unchecked, there may be no speakers of traditional Indigenous languages left at all by the year 2050 (McConvell and Thieberger 2001).

The linguistic situation is not unrelated to official language policy, which during most of the course of Australia’s history since colonisation has promoted an unrelenting culture of English monolingualism. Only in recent decades have there been positive government initiatives for the documentation, teaching, and public use of Indigenous languages (see chapter 8 for the general situation, §3.6 below for a discussion of bilingual education, and chapter 10 for legal contexts). For the turn-of-the-century situation, see Laughren (2000); for reference to Australian language policy documents see David Nash’s compilation at http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/policy.html.

Although it is generally assumed that all Australian languages are ultimately related (except for Meriam Mir from the Eastern Torres Strait, which is clearly Papuan (Piper 2013), and the languages of Tasmania (Bowern 2012)) such relatedness has been more easily established for some languages than for others. Koch (this volume, chapter 2) discusses this issue in more detail. The current common position is that there are about 25 families represented across the continent, with linguistic diversity unevenly distributed such that one single family, Pama-Nyungan, covers seven-eighths of the continent, and the remaining 24 non-Pama-Nyungan families are concentrated in a relatively small part of the north-west (see Map 3, where some of these families are indicated in small caps). While there are a number of phonological, grammatical and typological similarities across Australian languages, many of which are discussed in the chapters in this volume, there is also an enormous amount of differentiation, even among languages that are geographically close. This great range of languages and linguistic structures makes Australia a treasure trove for linguists, and descriptive and analytical work on these languages has proceeded apace over the last 40–50 years. Australian languages have also proven themselves to be particularly interesting for linguistic typology and theory in many respects; this factor has fuelled interest in these languages and is a theme that runs throughout the chapters in this volume.

Our knowledge of Australian languages varies enormously across the continent. Some languages ceased to be spoken long before substantial linguistic work could be undertaken. This is the case for the languages of Tasmania, many of the languages of Victoria, and Sydney, for example. Other languages have been the subject of a large amount of linguistic work, by a number of researchers, such as Warlpiri and the Arandic languages in Central Australia. Many languages fall somewhere in between these two extremes, with some amount of language description of varying degrees and quality.

A number of works provide overviews of Australian languages and their sociolinguistic, typological and grammatical properties. These include: Blake (1987); Bowern (2013); Dixon (1980, 2002); Evans (2007); Gaby (2008); Walsh (1991); Walsh and Yallop (1993, 2005); Yallop (1982), and also areal sourcebooks and surveys such as McGregor (1988, 2004); Menning and Nash (1981); Thieberger (1993) and Wafer et al. (2009).

This volume builds on and complements these works. We have attempted to summarise the developments in Australian linguistics that have taken place since the overviews in Current Trends in Linguistics (Capell 1971, O’Grady 1971, Wurm 1971) and Wurm (1972). To do this, we have focussed on the key areas of historical-comparative linguistics (Koch, Chapter 2); phonetics (Fletcher and Butcher, Chapter 3); (morpho)phonology (Baker, Chapter 4); case, constituency and grammatical relations (Nordlinger, Chapter 5); complex predicates (Bowern, Chapter 6); semantics (Gaby and Singer, Chapter 7); language maintenance and revitalisation (Walsh, Chapter 8); language contact varieties (Meakins, Chapter 9), and Aboriginal English (Eades, Chapter 10). The final chapter completes the picture with a focus on Australian English (Collins, Chapter 11). These chapters provide extensive discussion of the development of research in each of these areas over the last 40–50 years, and reflect many of the key areas of research in the languages and linguistics of Australia during this time. Inevitably, however, there are areas of research that we have not been able to cover for lack of space; §3 of this chapter attempts to cover these areas in brief and point the reader to some of the relevant literature.

2 History of documentation and study³

The Australian languages first came to the attention of European scholars after the discovery of New South Wales by Captain James Cook in 1770 and the establishment of a British penal colony at Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1788. Cook’s voyages yielded a wordlist of the Guugu Yimidhirr language—including the word kangaroo (Haviland 1974). Wordlists of the Sydney language were collected by a number of officials and naval officers of the first colony. One of these, Lieutenant William Dawes, began a systematic study of the grammar, but his results remained largely unknown until relatively recently (Troy 1992, 1993; http://www.williamdawes.org). The collection of wordlists, most of which used a very unsatisfactory English-based spelling, continued for the first century of European settlement. The largest published collection was in E. M. Curr’s (1886–1887) The Australian race, which includes three volumes of lists of up to 120 words for a great many localities of Australia. Many of these were supplied by settlers, policemen, missionaries, etc. For some languages this is the only documentation available.

Most of the early attempts to describe the grammar of Australian languages were made by missionaries (Threlkeld 1834, Ridley 1875, Teichelmann and Schürmann 1840, Meyer 1843).⁴ Around the beginning of the twentieth century grammatical sketches were published by the surveyor R. H. Mathews and the physician W. E. Roth (1984), among others. These were typically expressed in terms of the European Traditional Grammar framework, with the result that modern linguists find them unsatisfactory (see Koch 2008). An increase in the amount of documentation as well as in the professional quality of linguistic descriptions followed from: the work of Arthur Capell in the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University from the 1930s; the involvement of linguists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics from the 1950s; funding from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS, later AIATSIS) in Canberra from the early 1960s; and the establishing of linguistics departments in Australian universities from the late 1960s and 1970s. Indigenous linguists have played an increasing role in the documentation of their own languages (e.g. Bani and Alpher 1987, Ford and Ober 1991, Henderson and Dobson 1994, Granites and Laughren 2001, Bell 2003, Turpin and Ross 2012). In recent years the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity has provided extensive support and training for Indigenous communities interested in documenting and revitalising their own languages (see http://www.rnld.org for details).

The main avenues of publication of the results of linguistic research have been: Sydney University’s Oceania journal and Oceanic Linguistics monograph series, Monash University’s Linguistic Communications series, AIAS (now Aboriginal Studies Press) in Canberra, Pacific Linguistics at Canberra’s Australian National University,⁵ Dixon and Blake’s five volumes of the Handbook of Australian Languages (Australian National University Press and Oxford University Press), Cambridge University Press, Mouton (de Gruyter), and Lincom Europa. A recent initiative of the last-named publisher is a series Outstanding Grammars from Australia, edited by R. M. W. Dixon, which consists of facsimile copies of thesis-length descriptions of (primarily) Australian languages. A number of dictionaries have been published by the Institute for Aboriginal Development (now IAD Press), Batchelor Press, and Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative in Nambucca Heads, N.S.W. For further on the history of documentation of Australian languages the reader is referred to McGregor (2008).

3 Areas of research not covered in this book

It became clear to us at the outset of this project that a single volume would not be enough to include discussion of all of the research that has been undertaken on the languages of Australia in the past 50 years. There are, therefore, a number of strands of research that we have not been able to cover adequately in this volume. In this section we briefly survey some of these, and point the reader to the mai...

Table of contents

• The World of Linguistics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Maps
• Part I: Traditional Indigenous languages of Australia
• Part II: Post-contact language varieties
• Language Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index