Historical and cultural background

Prior to 1788, an Indigenous population of some 300,000 people distributed across what is now Australia spoke an estimated 250 languages and perhaps again as many distinctive dialects. The speech communities were relatively self-contained (though not necessarily monolingual), typically comprising 500 to 600 people united with a common inheritance of language, land and world-view. There had, indeed, been some foreign contact prior to the coming of Captain Cook in 1770, including visits in the early 17^th century from Spanish and Dutch navigators and contacts in northern regions with Portuguese and Malay traders (Harris 1991: 196). There is, however, little or no linguistic legacy from these contacts.

The British occupation of the area around Port Jackson in New South Wales (NSW) from 1788 brought Aboriginal people for the first time into more or less intensive contact with English speakers. From the first, the local people preferred to keep with their own kind and entered into communication with the English speakers only on an intermittent basis. However, as the number of colonists increased and Indigenous society became increasingly devastated and depleted through the effects of the colonial experience, cross-cultural communication increased, drawing on the resources of both the local Indigenous varieties and the various dialectal and sociolectal varieties of English brought by the newcomers.

It has been demonstrated by Troy (1990) that between 1788 and 1845 the interaction between the Aboriginal people and the English-speaking colonists led to the development of a jargon, incorporating elements of the Sydney language and of English, which progressively stabilized into a variety, or varieties, of pidgin, referred to as NSW Pidgin. Although the jargon served the purposes of communication between Aboriginal people and colonists, its use soon extended beyond this. The process by which it expanded in structure and function to become NSW Pidgin was favored by a number of factors. These included the contribution of existing contact varieties developing in the Pacific (Mühlhäusler 1991: 169), the disruption of pre-contact social and territorial patterns, the bringing-together of Indigenous people requiring a lingua franca, and the Indigenous people’s need for a linguistic variety in which they “could rationalize the radical social changes they experienced as a result of contact with the colonists” (Troy 1990: 7).

NSW Pidgin, then, became a highly significant medium of communication in colonial Australia, and it developed two major varieties, one, more influenced by the English superstrate, serving the needs of cross-cultural communication and the other, more influenced by the Aboriginal substrate languages, serving the needs of communication among Aboriginal people (Troy 1990). As it was used for Indigenous-based communication along traditional trade routes (Troy 1990: 2; Harris 1991: 199) and in the colonial explorations and expansion of pastoral properties (Harris 1991: 198; Sandefur 1979: 12) taking place to the north, west and south of the original settlement, as well as on ocean navigation routes (Malcolm 2001: 213), it provided the framework for the development of associated pidgins, creoles and non-StE varieties in many parts of Australia.

It is likely that the circumstances of contact in New South Wales (and in the other southern states) did not lead towards the development of creole varieties. The Pidgin performed the useful function of a lingua franca among Aboriginal people and, where it was supplanted under the ongoing and growing influence of English, it gave way to a non-StE ethnolect (Aboriginal English) rather than developing into an independent language. The creoles which developed in the Northern Territory and the Torres Strait Islands came about relatively more recently, favored by significantly different sociolinguistic circumstances.

By the late 19^th century, the pastoral industry, which had expanded progressively from its origins in New South Wales, had enabled the influence of NSW Pidgin to extend through Queensland into the Northern Territory. It seems likely, according to Harris (1991), that other pidgins developed in various locations where Aboriginal people settled down on stations or settlements, but that, under the influence of the Pidgin which had come from New South Wales, these had, by the beginning of the 20^th century, converged towards one widely-understood standard, which he calls Northern Territory Pidgin English. The creolization of this Pidgin began to occur in the context of an Anglican Church mission at Roper River which had been established in 1908. This mission, according to Harris (1991: 201), provided a refuge for Aboriginal people from eight different groups who had been facing “near annihilation” from hunting gangs. The creole began to form when the Pidgin was adopted by a generation of children at the mission as their language. The Roper River Creole (incorporating at least one other variety which developed later elsewhere) came to be spoken widely across the north of the continent, and by the mid-20^th century had come to displace an increasing number of Indigenous languages (Hudson 1981: 1). In 1976 this creole came to be referred to by the name Kriol, following the orthography which had been developed for the language (Hudson 1981: 169). It has at least 20,000 speakers.

The second major creole variety in Australia arose in the Torres Strait Islands where, according to Shnukal (1988: 5), following the discovery of commercial quantities of various products of the sea, large numbers of Europeans, South Sea Islanders, Papua New Guineans and others came to exploit these resources. A common language was required and an existing variety, Pacific Pidgin English, came to be used. Torres Strait Islanders who worked in the marine industries came to use this Pidgin, and by the 1890s it was being used by children of Torres Strait Islander and immigrant origin on one of the islands. Some years later the Pidgin creolized independently on another island. The use of the creoles spread throughout the islands, because they were not only found to be useful but also assumed by many to be English (Shnukal 1991: 183). Torres Strait Creole (or “Broken”, as it is called locally) has around 3,000 native speakers and up to 12,000 second language speakers (Shnukal 1991: 180).

The origins of Aboriginal English varieties are diverse. Mühlhäusler (1991: 170) has pointed out that there is evidence for the independent development of pidgins in a number of parts of Australia, and there is thus the possibility that independent Aboriginal English varieties arose in association with these. However, there is also significant evidence of the widespread influence on Aboriginal English in many parts of the country of NSW Pidgin (Malcolm 2001: 212−213). In places where creoles developed, the Aboriginal English varieties show some evidence of having undergone processes of decreolization. They have also been shown to bear clear resemblances to local Aboriginal languages and to non-standard Australian English (Eagleson, Kaldor and Malcolm 1982: 134). Evidence from cognitive linguistic research (Sharifian 2002) supports the view that even varieties which are formally close to Australian English maintain a significantly different conceptual basis. The strong resemblances between Aboriginal English varieties Australia-wide, and their maintenance as distinct from Australian English, suggest that to a large extent convergence has taken place upon an agreed ethnolect.