Alyawarr English

Abstract

This paper explores Alyawarr English, a new contact language spoken in Ipmangker, a remote Alyawarr community of Central Australia. Focusing on language use by children and drawing on a corpus of 50+ hrs of naturalistic video recordings, several aspects of Alyawarr English are examined in detail. The analysis centres on the origins of nominal and verbal morphology, with comparison to the patterns of replication evidenced in other new Australian contact languages. This reveals that children’s Alyawarr English has several points of symmetry with these languages. Nominal inflectional morphology is primarily derived from Alyawarr sources. Verb morphology is primarily derived from Kriol/English sources. The lexicon is derived from both Kriol/English and Alyawarr sources. Variation between morphology of Alyawarr and Kriol/English sources is also considered in each domain, to further elucidate what gets replicated and why in the ongoing development of new Australian contact languages.