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Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in the traditionally Gurindji-speaking communities of northern Australia. Nearly all words in Gurindji Kriol are derived from Gurindji or from Kriol, both of which have been described as lacking a stop voicing contrast, at least in basilectal varieties in the case of Kriol. In this study, we describe variation in voice onset time in Gurindji Kriol, in both picture naming and in conversational speech by young Gurindji Kriol speaking women. For picture naming, Australian English comparison data are also reported. The results indicate that in Gurindji Kriol, VOT varies systematically in expected ways by place of articulation, and position in word and utterance, but not according to the phonological voicing category of cognate English words. Initial stops tend to have short-lag VOT of up to 30 ms; values can be longer in English code-switched forms. Medial stops tend to have negative VOT. The present data do not suggest a voicing contrast based on VOT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words relative to their English cognates, by comparing picture-prompted citation speech from five young Gurindji Kriol speaking women and four young Australian English speaking women from Katherine, the nearest town. The results indicate systematic differences in vowel pronunciation and vowel variability between Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English, in monophthongs and diphthongs. We also consider the vowel variation in these tokens in the context of the likely vowel phoneme inventory in Gurindji Kriol, or the extent of permitted within-category variation in the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people at Kalkaringi in northern Australia. It has retained many of the features of Gurindji including case-marking, many other nominal suffixes (inflectional and derivational) and significant portions of vocabulary (including nouns and coverbs). It has also lost many features of Gurindji including inflecting verbs and bound pronouns. Other systems have also been significantly affected by language contact. For example, although the Gurindji cardinal direction system is in evidence, it is greatly reduced both inflectionally and functionally. Where the paradigm of Gurindji cardinals contains 28 inflected forms for each cardinal direction and these are used pervasively to describe large and small-scale space, Gurindji Kriol contains at most four inflected forms for each cardinal direction and they are only used for descriptions of large-scale space. Despite this reduction in the use of Gurindji cardinal directions, Gurindji Kriol has not replaced or supplemented this system with Kriol cardinal terms or with the English left/right system. Instead Gurindji Kriol favours deictic terms and gesture to express spatial relations. Yet deixis and gesture are only useful in so far as the speaker and hearer can see each other. The final part of this paper presents the results of a 'Man and tree' task which was conducted at Kalkaringi with 11 Gurindji Kriol participants and six Gurindji participants. The task was designed specifically to reveal strategies of spatial description in small-scale space where the speaker's and hearer's view of each other is obscured. What emerges from this test is the pervasive use of cardinal directions and the suggestion that the mental map of younger Gurindji people is still based on fixed bearings despite the paucity of cardinal directions in natural discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the new language called Gurindji Kriol. The language spoken most frequently by Gurindji people between the ages of 3 and about 45, is a counter-example to the generalization that mixed language arise from code-switching. This language is made up of elements of Kriol, an English based creole spoken across the middle of the Northern Territory of Australia; and Gurindji, the traditional language of a group in the west of this region. The previous generation spoke both these languages fluently, but the most prevalent type of speech involved intersentential and intrasentential code switching. While social meaning and discourse considerations influenced choice of language in code switching among middle-aged and older people in the 1970s and 80s, there was a tendency for a particular split pattern of language assignment to be used. Kriol provided most of the syntax, and the tense, aspect and mood and transitivity morphology, and Gurindji the case-morphology on nouns and pronouns, as well as much of the nominal lexicon and many of the coverbs taking the role of verbs.

The article reports on the inclusion of a paper related to Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language, in the current issue of the journal which was not appeared in a previous issue of the periodical.