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A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.
The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 up to possibly 363. The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings. Despite this uncertainty, the Indigenous Australian languages are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages", or the "Australian family".
Koori is a demonym for Aboriginal Australians from a region that approximately corresponds to southern New South Wales and Victoria. The word derives from the Indigenous language Awabakal. For some people and groups, it has been described as a reclaiming of Indigenous language and culture, as opposed to relying on European titles such as "Aboriginal". The term is also used with reference to institutions involving Koori communities and individuals, such as the Koori Court, Koori Radio and Koori Knockout.
Pickaninny is a pidgin word for a small child, possibly derived from the Portuguese pequenino.
The Kaurna people are a group of Aboriginal people whose traditional lands include the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. They were known as the Adelaide tribe by the early settlers. Kaurna culture and language were almost completely destroyed within a few decades of the British colonisation of South Australia in 1836. However, extensive documentation by early missionaries and other researchers has enabled a modern revival of both language and culture. The phrase Kaurna meyunna means "Kaurna people".
Many Australian Aboriginal cultures have or traditionally had a manually coded language, a signed counterpart of their oral language. This appears to be connected with various speech taboos between certain kin or at particular times, such as during a mourning period for women or during initiation ceremonies for men, as was also the case with Caucasian Sign Language but not Plains Indian Sign Language, which did not involve speech taboo, or deaf sign languages, which are not encodings of oral language. There is some similarity between neighboring groups and some contact pidgin similar to Plains Indian Sign Language in the American Great Plains.
Makassar people from the region of Sulawesi in Indonesia began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 18th century, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land. They were men who collected and processed trepang, a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary value generally and for its supposed medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia.
Australian Aboriginal English is a dialect of English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian population. It is made up of a number of varieties which developed differently in different parts of Australia, and grammar and pronunciation differs from that of standard Australian English, along a continuum. Some of its words have also been adopted into standard or slang Australian English.
Australian Kriol is an English-based creole language that developed from a pidgin used initially in the region of Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, in the early days of European colonisation. Later, it was spoken by groups further west and north. The pidgin died out in most parts of the country, except in the Northern Territory, where the contact between European settlers, Chinese and other Asians and the Aboriginal Australians in the northern regions has maintained a vibrant use of the language, spoken by about 30,000 people. Despite its similarities to English in vocabulary, it has a distinct syntactic structure and grammar and is a language in its own right. It is distinct from Torres Strait Creole.
Kaurna is a Pama-Nyungan language historically spoken by the Kaurna peoples of the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. The Kaurna peoples are made up of various tribal clan groups, each with their own parnkarra district of land and local dialect. These dialects were historically spoken in the area bounded by Crystal Brook and Clare in the north, Cape Jervis in the south, and just over the Mount Lofty Ranges. Kaurna ceased to be spoken on an everyday basis in the 19th century and the last known native speaker, Ivaritji, died in 1929. Language revival efforts began in the 1980s, with the language now frequently used for ceremonial purposes, such as dual naming and welcome to country ceremonies.
Australia legally has no official language. However, English is by far the most commonly spoken and has been entrenched as the de facto national language since European settlement. Australian English is a major variety of the English language with a distinctive pronunciation and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. General Australian serves as the standard dialect.
Diyari or Dieri is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by the Diyari people in the far north of South Australia, to the east of Lake Eyre. It was studied by German Lutheran missionaries who translated Christian works into the language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so that it developed an extensive written form. Only a few fluent speakers of Diyari remained by the early 21st century, but a dictionary and grammar of the language was produced by linguist Peter K. Austin, and there is a project under way to teach it in schools.
World Englishes is a term for emerging localised or indigenised varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by the United Kingdom or the United States. The study of World Englishes consists of identifying varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally and analyzing how sociolinguistic histories, multicultural backgrounds and contexts of function influence the use of English in different regions of the world.
Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.
The Bungandidj people are an Aboriginal Australian people from the Mount Gambier region in south-eastern South Australia, and also in western Victoria. Their language is the Bungandidj language. Bungandidj was historically frequently rendered as Boandik, Buandig, or Booandik.
Ngarluma and Kariyarra are members of a dialect continuum, which is a part of the Ngayarda language group of Western Australia, in the Pama–Nyungan language family. Some sources suggest that an extinct dialect, Jaburara, was a third member of the continuum. However, it is clear that Jaburara had a distinct identity that has been partly obscured by a collapse in the numbers of Jaburara speakers during the late 19th century, and there is some evidence that Jaburara may have instead been a dialect of Martuthunira.
Port Jackson Pidgin English or New South Wales Pidgin English is an English-based pidgin that originated in the region of Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales in the early days of colonisation. Stockmen carried it west and north as they expanded across Australia. It subsequently died out in most of the country, but was creolised in the Northern Territory at the Roper River Mission (Ngukurr), where missionaries provided a safe place for Indigenous Australians from the surrounding areas to escape deprivation at the hands of European settlers. As the Indigenous Australians who came to seek refuge at Roper River came from different language backgrounds, there grew a need for a shared communication system to develop, and it was this that created the conditions for Port Jackson Pidgin English to become fleshed out into a full language, Kriol, based on English language and the eight different Australian language groups spoken by those at the mission.
John W. Harris is an Australian Bible translator and linguist known for his works on aboriginal Christianity and creoles. He is one of the first scholars who provided a detailed account of Australian creoles. In 1986, he was Senior Lecturer in Education at Darwin Institute of Technology. He received a Lambeth Degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2010.
References
- Foster, Robert & Monaghan, Paul & Mühlhäusler, Peter (2003). Early forms of Aboriginal English in South Australia, 1840-1920s (PDF). Pacific Linguistics, 538. Australian National Univ.
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