Contact and indigenous languages in Australia

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century many of the original 250 languages of Australia ceased to be spoken, especially in areas where the indigenous peoples’ land was intensively settled and farmed by the newcomers. Since that time there has been a collapse of the languages, with fewer than 20 currently being passed on to children (McConvell, Marmion, & McNicol 2005; Walsh 2005; McConvell & Thieberger 2006). Many of those who have shifted away from traditional languages speak distinctive Aboriginal dialects of English and, in the north, varieties of an English-based creole language (Kriol and Torres Strait Creole). The present population of indigenous people in Australia is around 400,000, Assuming the population at early colonization to have been about 750,000, the average size of a language group (including several dialects) would have been 3,000. Some groups were much smaller, of the order of 100–200, while a few may have been considerably larger, but probably no more than about 5,000–6,000 speakers. The low population sizes are not unusual for hunter-gatherer groups in many areas of the world, but they may have implications for language contact phenomena as exposure to neighboring languages and multilingualism is more common than with languages with larger territories and populations (e.g. Sutton 1978; Brandl & Walsh 1982). The first topic covered in this chapter is the role of language contact and diffusion in the history of Australian indigenous languages. Much controversy surrounds this issue as it has been suggested, particularly by Dixon (1997; 2002), that the role of diffusion and convergence is much more significant in Australia than elsewhere, and that the conventional models of language families generated by the comparative method in linguistics may be inapplicable in Australia for this reason (Dixon 2002: 699). This view is contested by other Australianist linguists (e.g. Alpher 2005; Sutton & Koch 2008). Beyond this debate some of the studies of the intertwining of inheritance and diffusion in some areas of Australia are examined, and their contribution to understanding prehistory more generally. Attention then turns to the new contact languages and contact interactions of recent times in Australia, including the early pidgins, and the creoles which they engendered when they became the first language of children of speakers of traditional indigenous languages. As well as shift to these creoles, the modern situation includes examples of heavy influence of English and creoles on the traditional indigenous languages, and “mixed languages” emerging from hybridization of the traditional languages with creoles.