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Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This article describes an unusual result of language contact occurring in North-Central Australia, where extensive long-term contact between speakers of the genetically unrelated Jingulu and Mudburra has resulted in a high degree of lexical borrowing, with little if any change to syntactic or morphological structure in either language. What is particularly unusual about this borrowing is that it is bidirectional, with almost equal numbers of words being borrowed from Jingulu into Mudburra as vice versa. This situation mirrors that of converted languages, where two varieties have come to share a grammar through contact, but retain separate lexicons. Design/methodology/approach: We use a comparative database to establish the direction of noun borrowings between these languages. Data and analysis: The comparative database consists of 871 nouns shared by Jingulu and Mudburra and also includes 571 corresponding nouns from a number of geographically and phylogenetically neighbouring languages: Wambaya, Gurindji, Jaminjung, Jaru, Warlmanpa and Warumungu. Findings/conclusions: We show that for nouns alone, Mudburra and Jingulu share 65% of their forms. What makes the Jingulu-Mudburra situation even more unusual is the relatively balanced bidirectional nature of borrowings, with 32% of shared nouns originating in Mudburra and 24.5% from Jingulu (for the remaining 43.5%, direction of borrowing could not be determined). Originality: We suggest that that this situation of bidirectional borrowing represents a hitherto unreported type of language hybridisation scenario, which we dub 'lexical convergence'. Significance/implications: We claim that this unusual situation is the result of long-term cohabitation of the two groups, a shared cultural life and relative socio-political equality between the two groups. We venture that these may be requisite to the sort of extensive bidirectional borrowing and maintenance of individual grammatical systems found in lexical convergence more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Something like over a quarter of the speakers of the Western and Central Language of Torres Strait speak the Kalaw Lagaw Ya dialect. The language may have started its formation as early as over 2600 years ago, through the colonisation of Torres Strait by a mixed South-East Papuan Austronesian and East Trans-Fly Papuan group, who overlaid local Paman Australians on the western and southern islands. Though the language is Australian, it has been heavily influenced by both Papuan and Austronesian languages. Typologically the language is between the Paman and South-Central/ Eastern-Trans Fly Papuan languages. It is on the continuum between declensional and agglutinative in morphology and has A O V // S V word order. Case inflections are suffixed to nominals to mark their syntactic role in the clause. Verb stems are modified to show attainative versus active telicity, number, aspect, mood and tense. Grammatical number encodes singular, dual and plural. There are two genders, masculine and feminine, marked only on the singular, which for non humans encode cultural significance (masculine) and innate significance (feminine). A complex agglutinative system of deictics also exists. There is a range of speech styles, much of which has a direct ancestry in pre-colonisation times - formal, archaic, poetic, joking, colloquial, "baby" language, and so on. Though there is a tradition of over a century of writing in the language, starting with the mission schools in the 1870s, education through the language has been sadly ignored by educationalists, and the language faces all the typical problems of those spoken by indigenous minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the Australian education system, Aboriginal students' use of non-standard English features is often viewed simplistically as evidence of non-attainment of literacy and oral-English milestones. One reason for this is the widespread use of assessment tools which fail to differentiate between native-English speakers and students who are learning English as a second language. In these assessments, non-standard English features are framed as 'mistakes' and low scores taken as evidence of 'poor' performance. This paper will contrast a mistake-oriented analysis with one that incorporates knowledge of the students' first language. It will clearly show that when consideration is given to the first language, a more nuanced picture of English proficiency emerges: one that is attuned to the specific second language learning pathway and thus far better placed to inform both assessment and classroom instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language combining Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) with varieties of English and/or Kriol that has emerged within approximately the last thirty-five years, shows radical restructuring of the verbal auxiliary system, including modal categories that differ from those in the source languages. The structure of Light Warlpiri overall is that of a mixed language, in that most verbs and some verbal morphology are drawn from English and/or Kriol, and most nominal morphology is from Warlpiri. Nouns are drawn from both Warlpiri-lexicon and English-lexicon sources. The restructuring of the auxiliary system draws selectively on elements from Warlpiri and several varieties and styles of English and/or Kxiol, combined in such a way as to produce novel constructions. It may be that when multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, innovative categories are likely to appear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the readability criterion and the use of jargon in enterprise agreements made in the domain of higher education and fast food sectors between 1993 and 2011. It informs that very small progress has been made during this period in improving readability or abating the use of jargon in agreements.

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 a contact variety spoken in northern Australia which has been identified as a mixed language. Yet its status as an autonomous language system must be questioned for three reasons — (i) it continues to be spoken alongside its source languages, Gurindji and Kriol, (ii) it has a close diachronic and synchronic relationship to code-switching between Gurindji and Kriol, and (iii) its structure bears a strong resemblance to patterns found in this code-switching. Nonetheless in this paper I present criteria which support the claim of ‘language-hood’ for Gurindji Kriol. I demonstrate that Gurindji Kriol (i) is a stable language variety (it has child language learners and a high degree of inter-speaker consistency), (ii) has developed independent forms and structural subsystems which have not been adopted back into the source languages, and (iii) contains structural features from both languages which is rare in other language contact varieties including Kriol/Gurindji code-switching. I also present a number of structural indicators which can be used to distinguish Gurindji Kriol mixed language clauses from code-switched clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each language. Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are two new Australian mixed languages, spoken in similar, yet slightly different, sociolinguistic contexts, and with similar, yet slightly different, argument marking systems. The different sociolinguistic situations and systems of argument marking lead to a difference in how speakers of each language interpret simple transitive sentences in a comprehension task. Light Warlpiri speakers rely on ergative case-marking as an indicator of agents more often than Gurindji Kriol speakers do. Conversely, Gurindji Kriol speakers rely on word order more often than Light Warlpiri speakers do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken in northern Australia. It is derived from Gurindji, a Pama-Nyungan language, and Kriol, an English-lexifier creole language. Despite these clear sources, Gurindji Kriol contains grammatical systems which are not found in Gurindji or Kriol, for example asymmetrical serial verb constructions. The origin of these constructions is unclear given that Kriol only contains a very limited set of serial verb constructions and they are not found in Gurindji. The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions is examined and it is suggested that they are a product of the more restricted Kriol serial verb construction developing and expanding under the influence of the Gurindji complex verb. The formation of this construction was a part of the more general genesis of the mixed language which was derived from code-switching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tackling the phenomenon of using Arabic words by second-generation Lebanese-Australians when conversing in English, and reading it culturally and sociologically, constitutes the primary aim of this article. In so doing, this paper concentrates on a number of spoken Arabic words with particular emphasis on the word "habiib", and shows the relationship between these linguistic constructs and the boundary construction of the embattled identity of these youths. Furthermore, the probing into "habiib" and to a lesser degree, into other Arabic terms, reveals the power relations that traverse the linguistic world of the male and female youths examined by this article. In other words, this article shows the extent to which hybrid linguistic constructs constitute, and are constituted by, unequal gender and ethnic relations. They are also shown to be strategic acts of resistance against the broader community, which tends to keep the users of these words at the margin of society. [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.