Australian languages

This strain of descriptive research is devoted to understanding how words, phrases and grammatical constructions from Aboriginal languages are used within everyday interactional settings.

Interactional linguistics is concerned with:

• meaningful actions within interaction
• problems relating to human coordination and intersubjectivity.

It hinges on the analysis of transcribed audio of video and audio recordings.

While Aboriginal language conversations contribute enormously to the science of human communication, interactional linguistics in turn contributes to the maintenance and revitalisation of Australia’s endangered linguistic heritage by providing baseline data about everyday language use.

All Australian languages are under pressure from English, to varying degrees. While a small number of these languages are still being acquired by children, many languages are no longer actively spoken or are highly endangered.

Across the country myriad grass-roots programs attempt to inject new life into languages that:

• have been sleeping
• are no longer used for daily conversation
• merely need some help adapting to the demands of 21st-century life.

The diversity in Australian linguistic types is matched by enormous cultural diversity and systems of social organisation.

Australian languages provide fascinating insights into the differing world views of different Aboriginal groups, as revealed through semantic categories and systems of language use (pragmatics).

Linguistic research on Australian languages is often very interdisciplinary, dovetailing with:

• anthropology (especially as pertaining to kinship, social organisation and land tenure)
• archaeology
• ethnobiology
• musicology
• sociotopography.

Using lexical, acoustic, instrumental and corpus analysis, we are investigating the properties of sounds in Australian languages: consonants and vowels, and how they are organized into syllables, word, phrases and utterances.

This work informs our understanding of:

• individual Indigenous languages
• historical relationships between language families in Australia
• theories of phonological and prosodic structure in human language in general.

This project aims to re-examine claims that Aboriginal Australians conduct conversations in different ways to Anglo-Australians. It will investigate and compare ordinary conversations in these groups on a large scale.

The project expects to provide new evidence to explicate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conversational norms, pinpointing differences which may lead to intercultural miscommunication.

Expected outcomes include:

• endangered language documentation
• evidence-based findings to disseminate to service providers, communities and Aboriginal organisations to improve ways of engaging with each other.

In addition, the project will benefit Aboriginal communities with new approaches to language revitalisation.

Learn more about CIARA. This is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP180100515).

We are examining the phonological structure of the Australian language Kaytetye, a member of the Arandic language family.

Arandic languages have previously been analysed as having unusual syllable structures, raising important questions for phonological theory.

Through careful documentation and phonetic analysis of Kaytetye word and sentence structure, we aim to shed more light on its phonological organisation, and implications for general theories of phonology and universals in language.

This is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP150100845).

This interactional linguistics project describes the use of the Jaru language within face-to-face conversation.

Jaru is an endangered language (Ngumpin, Pama-Nyungan) of the East Kimberly region of Western Australia.

Jaru conversation exhibit a substantial degree of mixing with Kriol, a contact Creole from northern Australia.

Learn more about Jaru on the CIARA site.

Gija is an endangered Jarragan language from the East Kimberley region of Western Australia.

This interactional linguistics project explores the use of gesture and language within a corpus of face-to-face conversations.

Learn more about Gija on the CIARA site.

This project investigates the acquisition of kinship concepts by Murrinhpatha speaking children in Wadeye, Northern Territory.

Learn more about Murrinhpatha on the CIARA site.

This project is funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100399).