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Article published In:
Australian Contact Languages
Edited by Carmel O'Shannessy, Denise Angelo and Jane Simpson
[Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 39:1] 2024
► pp. 71–124

After 1788

Contact varieties in the first sixty years of Australia’s colonisation

ORCID logo | Australian National University
Contemporary contact languages used by Indigenous people in Australia share many words and grammatical features and structures. I trace the development of contact varieties in Australia between 1788 to 1848, arguing that their similarities arise from the dominance of English-speakers among the invaders, their ways of talking to people who did not speak English fluently, the transfer of people between penal settlements, and the fact that sea traffic was the fastest form of travel between colonies. Evidence for zones of influence in which particular features appear is drawn from geographic distribution and time of first attestation. I use four types of reports for locating features: outsiders’ reports of direct speech by Aborigines and of outsiders’ speech to Aborigines, imitations by outsiders of Aboriginal speech, and outsiders’ comments on Aboriginal speech. Another kind of evidence comes from the adoption of contact variety words into Aboriginal languages. This is illustrated with a case study of words for ‘white woman’ in Aboriginal languages.
Keywords: Australian Indigenous languages, Australian English-lexified contact varieties, NSW pidgin, English foreigner talk, learner English, historical linguistics, slang, nautical jargon
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Previous work
  • Data
  • Background
    • Before the invasion – the Pacific
    • Before the invasion – Australia
    • Early interactions and the start of an English-lexified contact variety
    • Early land-based spread
    • Land and sea-based spread to Moreton Bay (Queensland)
  • Invasion by sea
    • Invasion by sea: Tasmania (1803)
    • Invasion by sea: spreading along the south coast: Victoria and South Australia
    • Victoria (1803)
    • South Australia (1836)
    • Invasion by sea: Western Australia (1826)
    • Words taken into Aboriginal languages from contact varieties
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 6 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00130.sim
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