Felicity Meakins, University of Manchester
"Two to tangle: The origins and structure of Gurindji Kriol, an Australian mixed language"
Department Colloquium
Monday, February 11, 2008
4:00 PM
182 Dwinelle Hall
Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by the Gurindji people in northern Australia. It isaround 30 years old and is the result of contact between the traditional owners of the area, the Gurindji, and non-indigenous colonists. These colonists established cattle stations on Gurindji land in the early 1900s and brought with them an English-lexified creole language, Kriol, via imported Aboriginal labour (McConvell & Meakins, 2005). Structurally, Gurindji Kriol exhibits an rare split between the NP and VP systems, with Kriol contributing much of the VP structure including the tense, aspect and mood system; and the nominal structure, complete with case suffixes and other inflectional and derivational morphology, originating from Gurindji. Nonetheless Gurindji Kriol is not merely the result of a simple replication of features from these languages. Though Gurindji Kriol bears some resemblance to both of its source languages, it uses the forms from these languages to function within a unique system (Meakins, 2007).
The emergence of Gurindji Kriol is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, the presence of Gurindji case morphology within a Kriol verbal frame is exceptional given the fragility of inflectional morphology in other language contact situations (see for e.g. Muysken, 2000; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). The genesis of Gurindji Kriol is also interesting historically as elsewhere in northern Australia, Kriol has been steadily replacing traditional Aboriginal languages (Munro, 2000). In this talk, I will explore the origins of Gurindji Kriol from both a linguistic and social perspective. I will examine the socio-political origins of Gurindji Kriol in terms of the historical events, changing social and geographical relations, and the language ecology of this area in northern Australia during the period leading up to its genesis. I will then discuss the fusion of the Gurindji and Kriol language systems into an autonomous system using a case study of the Gurindji-derived ergative marker. I argue that this case marker has transformed into a discourse marker in Gurindji Kriol as a result of contact and competition between Gurindji and Kriol systems of argument marking.
McConvell, P., & Meakins, F. (2005). Gurindji Kriol: A mixed language emerges from code-switching. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 9-30.
Meakins, F. (2007). Case marking in contact: The development and function of case morphology in Gurindji Kriol, an Australian mixed language. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Melbourne, Melbourne.
Munro, J. (2000). Kriol on the move: A case of language spread and shift in Northern Australia. In J. Siegal (Ed.), Processes of language contact: Studies from Australia and the South Pacific (pp. 245-270). Saint-Laurent (Quebec): Fides.
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomason, S. G., & Kaufman, T. (1988). Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.