Carmel O’Shannessy gave a colloquium at the University of Indiana on Feb. 1 entitled, “Language contact and acquisition: A new mixed language in northern Australia.
Abstract:
A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has emerged in a remote community in northern Australia. It is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Light Warlpiri is a verb-noun mixed language, meaning that it cannot be traced to a sole parent language, and that its verbal and nominal components tend to come from different source languages. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol (AE/Kriol), while most nominal morphology is from Lajamanu Warlpiri (the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu community). Nouns are drawn from both types of source language. An innovative auxiliary system has developed which draws on, but is not the same as, the systems in the source languages. But the system for indicating grammatical functions draws directly on the typologically different source languages. Lajamanu Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system while AE/Kriol uses word order (SVO) in a nominative-accusative system. In Light Warlpiri these two systems meet and are in functional competition. The structure of Light Warlpiri, and code-switching patterns of older speakers in the community, provide empirical evidence that languages of this type can arise from alternational code-switching practices.The language ecology in the community is complex, and code-switching between languages is very common. The complex contact situation, in which there is also rapid change, raises the question of how much variation there is in how grammatical functions are indicated within each of the two main languages spoken, and how children deal with the mixed input they receive. Analyses show that adults and children who speak both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri distribute ergative marking differently in each language - they use it more often in Lajamanu Warlpiri and less often in Light Warlpiri. Children produce more regular patterns of interaction between case-marking and word order than adults do, suggesting that they are active agents of language change.
