Desert dynamics: Language evolution and change in a small-scale multilingual community

Abstract

A striking feature of multilingualism in pre-colonial Australia was its presence even within sparsely populated regions of the continent. In the northern expanses of the western desert region, these traditional patterns of widespread multilingualism persisted right up until the middle of the last century. In the late 1940s, multilingualism even intensified, with colonial contact bringing together a highly diverse population of Kukatja, Pintupi, Ngardi, Walmajarri, Jaru, and Warlpiri-speaking peoples, at the (Old) Balgo Mission. However, by the late 1960s, a striking development at the Mission was the rapid emergence of Kukatja as a lingua franca and a concomitant restructuring of multilingual practises across different generations. For Balgo, there remain unanswered questions regarding the emergence of this new ‘communilect’, namely: i) what were the sociolinguistic dynamics that led to the emergence of a lingua franca? ii) who led these linguistic changes? and iii) how did the diverse patterns of pre-existing multilingual variation shape the communilect during its formation?

In this talk I introduce a REAL TIME corpus of the Kukatja language spanning the critical period of 1960–2000s that provides an avenue through which to make tangible progress on these questions. This corpus—made possible by long term community collaborations and repatriation efforts—constitutes a rare opportunity within the Australian context to track linguistic variables within the speech of multiple individuals at multiple time points across nearly five decades of intense language contact and change. Crucially, these changes unfolded in a context in which English played a relatively minor role, permitting novel insights into the types of language contact effects that may have been widespread in pre-colonial Australia. I provide an overview of the types of variation observed in the corpus and outline avenues of investigation in an upcoming project.

About the speaker

Dr. Tom Ennever | Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey
Dr. Tom Ennever is a postdoctoral researcher investigating variation and language change in Kukatja, an Australian Aboriginal language. His research interests span phonology, language documentation, semantic and structural typology, as well as the interaction of language, culture and cognition. Underpinning the breadth of this research is his long-term collaboration with members of the Balgo community with whom he has worked since 2016 on various  projects at the intersection of language, art and land management.