Given the number of languages that are disappearing itâs nice to hear of a previously unknown one coming to light.
Iâm no expert, but that doesnât sound like a new language - more of a creole or pidgin or something. Iâm not sure how linguists draw the line, but there must be one.
Apologies in advance:
âCome on, baby, Light WalpiriâŚâ
Iâm no expert, but I disagree with the experts!
From Wikipedia: âA creole language is a stable, full-fledged language that originated from a pidgin.â
So I guess Iâm not sure what youâre actually saying here.
Cool, I didnât know that. I guess I thought they were more or less the same thing. I guess I meant to say pidgin, but I was afraid it had racist overtones. Creole makes me sound cooler.
Iâm no linguist either, but:
When speakers of different languages meet repeatedly as adults they create a pidgin - a smattering of words from one or both, with little or no grammar.
If there are enough children who grow up in a linguistically diminished environment together (such as mostly hearing a pidgin) they will, in one generation, create a fully-fledged language, adding all the necessary grammar, and creating or importing new words. That is a creole language.
Also, we actually have observed children doing this kind of thing â Nicaraguan sign language. In that case the âpidginâ would be each childâs âhome signs,â the gestures they used with their families.
The last twenty years have seen significant change in remote Aboriginal communities as the sale of alcohol was banned entirely. As a result of this, there is now less engagement between white and black communities, more independence for aboriginal people, and better health as alcohol dependence is reduced. I think it is possible that this new language is a consequence of these changes.
Damn that stuff is interesting, innit?
Different levels of independence at different levels of the society.
Kriol is not at all at all âa form of aboriginal englishâ. It is a close relative of Tok Pisin and Bislama, however, despite substantial lexical borrowings, it bears essentially no gramatical relation to English.
Aboriginal english, on the other hand is a distinct variety of English (in the same sense that, British, American or Austrlain Englishes are varieties), with many interesting pragmatic subtilties that get in the way of clear communication between speakers of Aboriginal and Australian english. The wonderful Diana Eades has written quite a bit about the practical differences between Aboriginal and Australian Englishes in the hope of fostering beter communication, however she stopped after she noticed one of her books on the desk of a lawyer for the prosecution one day who was using her research to actively provide a false impression to the jury.
A good example of the frequent assumption that Kriol and Aboriginal English are bastardised versions of English is the analysis of the morpheme â-fellaâ as a borrowing from English âfellowâ. As in blackfella, whitefella. If you stop and think about this it is actually quite strange, why of all the English words for person would fellow have been borrowed?
Excuse me, my good fellow, would your be so kind as to drink this water. Itâs top stuff I just got from Myall Creek
Surely âmanâ would be the most obvious word to borrow instead. But whatâs more, why borrow a word for âpersonâ. Do we seriously suposse that indigenous Australians didnât have a word, or rather a whole range of words to deal with the concept person?
Instead the best bet (as of a few years ago at least), was that it is was originally from Eora, the now extinct language of much of the Sydney region and was is reconstructed as something along the lines of â-pelaâ (going off memory here), a suffix added to an adjective to mark that the adjective is modfiying the noun. and spread as the English/Indig contact jargon/pidgin spread with colonisation. It can still be found in Tok Pisin â-pelaâ, and Bislama and Pijin â-falaâ. It is was then borrowed from these creoles into Aboriginal English to become its most famous word (blackfella - n. Indigenous Australian).
I wonder if this is a case of homologous words between languages, where two words that sound similar also have similar meanings. I grew up in New Zealand and this item may or may not have entered the vernacular over there tooâit quite common to say to my friends something like âSee you fullas after schoolâ. In this case it seems to be a straight forward bastardisation of the word âfellow.â However, the terms âwhite fullasâ and âblack fullasâ also seemed to get used a lot as catch all terms for ethnicities. It never occurred to me (why would it?) that the different terms might have very different etymologies.
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