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Sahul, the ancient continent uniting Australia and New Guinea, is the only inhabited continent uniquely occupied by small-scale societies until colonial contact. And Australia (only separated from New Guinea for 10,000 years) is the only continent exclusively occupied by hunter-gatherers. This makes Sahul, and Australia, crucial for understanding how language has evolved through our deep human past. This chapter addresses three enigmas: first the discrepancy in deep linguistic diversity and typological disparity between the Australian and New Guinea hemi-continents (1 maximal clade in Australia, over 50 in New Guinea), second the apparent relatedness of all Australian indigenous languages despite continuous human occupation for 60,000 years with no external intrusions, and third the recent spread of the Pama-Nyungan branch of the Australian family over seven-eighths of the continent, most likely in the mid-Holocene?

This chapter explores the linguistic features and strategies of interpreting, particularly in higher education, through the description of various research projects involving Australian Sign Language (Auslan)/English interpreters, and their application to the education and practice of sign language interpreters. It discusses research studies focusing on the linguistic features used by Auslan interpreters when interpreting dense information, the relationship between interpreters' language and that of the deaf community, features of language contact used by interpreters and deaf people in university settings, linguistic strategies of Auslan interpreters when interpreting for a university lecture, and the use of translation style and omissions as strategies within the university discourse environment. It also considers deaf students' expectations of university interpreting and interpreting strategy, as well as the educational backgrounds of interpreters in relation to their ability to interpret in higher education.

This chapter reanalyses noun classification in the Australian language Dyirbal. While earlier analyses have proposed intricate class assignment principles rooted in conceptual features, we argue that Dyirbal noun classification is sensitive to salient phonological cues and a small core of cross‐linguistically common semantic cues in keeping with other familiar noun classification systems.

This chapter examines two potential types of quantitative depictive secondary predicate in Australian languages: co-participation and iterated involvement. The formal manifestation of these expression types is subject to variation: constructions found in Australian languages may involve agreement of a numeral with its controller (‘identical marking’), use of a numeral ‘one’ in the sense of ‘together’, locative marking of the quantifying expression, and other, more specific, lexical and grammatical ways. For each construction, the question is addressed of whether or not it is an instance of a dedicated depictive construction, which can be identified from NP-internal attributes on the one hand, and from adverbials on the other.

This chapter investigates the nature of ideological transformation among Wangkatha language consultants in Western Australia, highlighted in the wake of Native Title legislation designed to determine the veracity of Aboriginal claims to land rights. It identifies a schism between the actual and perceived benefits of successful claims, and explores the role of language as it is used by expert witnesses and community members. On-the-ground perceptions about how linguistic practices may be interpreted by a land claim judge influence practice and, potentially, ideology, with a transition from a dialect mesh to an ideologically bounded mosaic, from the prestige of language ownership to the power of language proficiency, and from extreme individual multilingualism to language guardianship. Proficiency in an unchanged, well-bounded traditional language is simultaneously venerated and guarded while traditional ideologies about linguistic identity are overshadowed, at least in the political and legal context.

The history of indigenous Aboriginal languages in eastern Australia for the 200 years following first European settlement in 1788 has been one of loss and extinction. By 1988 it appears that none of the approximately 70 languages originally spoken in what is now New South Wales and Victoria had fully fluent speakers who had acquired them as a first language as children. However, the last 25 years have seen the development of language revitalization projects in a number of communities across this region that have achieved remarkable outcomes, and have introduced Aboriginal languages into schools and other domains. This chapter is an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and attitudinal factors that relate to these developments, drawing on a case study of Gamilaraay-Yuwaalaraay from north-west New South Wales. The importance of local, regional, and national politics is also explored.

As language revival and revitalization rapidly become primary modes of community-based work in Aboriginal Australia, the need for a theoretical foundation for the linguistic scenarios that emerge is becoming increasingly evident. Language revival presents a new situation for analysis, as languages are simultaneously researched, learned, and developed in a single overarching and ongoing process. This brings to the fore the need to account for and implement vernacular approaches to language as well as disciplinary ones, as the languages are simply not available for objective academic study outside of community-internal motivations, processes, and analyses. To this end, the authors aim to develop a research methodology and epistemology that can benefit from ways of knowing and learning privileged in Aboriginal communities, as well as those of academic linguistics. The meeting points of these can be explored through collaborative community-based ventures, and in direct response to current developments in language revival itself.

While grammatical change has been a key area of interest for Australian historical linguistics, only a few studies have sought to explain the development of grammar in terms of processes of grammaticalization. This chapter explores the key reasons for the relative absence of grammaticalization studies in the Australianist tradition. It then shows how the development of a particular areal feature—second-position clitic constructions—may be explained in term of both grammaticalization and constructionalization. The chapter also discusses the development of dual-pronoun systems in Australian languages, and shows that it can be reasonably assumed that erstwhile bound pronouns have developed into free pronouns, in contrast to previous research claiming the emergence of bound pronouns from free pronouns.

This chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of expression of possession and of ownership in Martuthunira, an extinct Australian language, formerly spoken in the Plibara region of Northern Australia. Pertensive, proprietive are employed to express possessive relationships. Genitive is used for some types of possession, and some kinship relations. Privative is a way of marking negative possession. Part-whole relationship is coded by simple apposition. There are no verbs of possession: possession can be coded through verbs meaning ‘grab’, ‘catch’ and ‘hold’. The patterns of distribution of possessive marking in Martuthunira reflect the importance of kin relationships. There is a strong cultural distinction between close, or ‘dear’, kin, and more distantly related relatives. The ‘dear’ kin stand in contrast to the wider network of more distant classificatory kin in terms of their linguistic marking, and societal status.

The entrenched nature of the gender/classifier dichotomy stands in the way of better typologies of nominal classification. How can we move beyond it to a more integrated view of nominal classification? Looking at a range of kinds of data from the Australian language Mawng, it is clear that our understanding of many less well-known nominal classification systems reflects a lack of data on how the system is used. Mawng has what seems like a well-behaved system of five genders, including gender agreement in the verb. However, the genders, like classifiers, play a crucial role in constructing meaning in discourse, often in the absence of nouns. Nominal classification systems must be contextualized in terms of their roles in constructing meaning in discourse, in order to do them justice in typologies. Greater emphasis on the flexibility of nominal classification systems and less on the role of nouns will also move efforts forward.

As many linguists studying endangered languages have emphasized, every language contains, in its lexicon and grammar, a distinct conceptual universe that is going to disappear forever when the last remaining speakers of that language die out. In 1974 anthropologist Clifford Geertz published a famous paper titled “From the native’s point of view,” in which he presented capturing “the native’s” ways of thinking as a major goal of cognitive anthropology. This chapter defends Geertz’s vision against present-day skeptics and shows how the goal of capturing the insider’s way of thinking can be realized by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. By way of illustration, it reanalyzes a major grammatical category of Dalabon and other Australian languages known as the principle of “alternating generations.” The chapter shows how the social word of the speakers of Dalabon can be explained without technical English, in simple words cross-translatable into Dalabon itself, and thus describe Dalabon “social cognition” from the native speaker’s point of view.

Most of the world’s languages are dying out, and the ways of thinking and knowing embedded in their vocabulary are dying out, too. Linguistics has come to see as one of its central responsibilities to document as many of those languages as possible, in consultation with native speakers. But speakers of the indigenous languages that are now rapidly dying out do not think in academic English. This creates a big challenge for linguists accustomed to stating linguistic generalizations in English academese. This chapter shows how NSM can be used as an effective tool of communication with indigenous consultants and as a “natural semantic metalanguage” for modeling the indigenous meanings without imposing on them alien categories derived from the conceptual vocabulary of English.

Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredictability into the mapping of form to meaning. In this chapter, we examine a system of verb inflection allomorphy in the Murrinhpatha language of northern Australia, which shows a high level of complexity as measured by unpredictability of analogical relations in inflectional exponence. We argue that in this case the unpredictability is associated with incremental demorphologization, the process whereby morphology gradually dissolves into unanalysable lexical form. We present observations of analogical change in Murrinhpatha, comparing contemporary fieldwork documentation with data from forty years earlier, showing that a long-term process of demorphologization is still underway in recent generations, resulting in increasing complexity of the system.

Dyirbal has verbal inflections which have been referred to as ‘positive imperative’ and ‘negative imperative’. However, their meanings and functions extend far beyond these traditional labels. Their subjects can be first or second person singular and plural, and they can occur in questions. The ‘positive imperative’ refers to the potentiality of something, which usually does, but may not, eventuate. It corresponds to a number of modal meanings (should, can, must, and will). The negative imperative is used to suggest caution, warning about what it is inadvisable to do. It is shown how the ‘potentiality’ and ‘caution’ verbal inflections relate to the social ambiance in which they are used.

In the Dyirbal language community of north-east Australia there was a requirement of being at all times maximally specific. In keeping with the need for precision, there is a set of grammatical markers which accompany nouns and verbs, indicating whether the referent is ‘there and visible’ (markers commencing with ba-), or ‘here and visible’ (ya–), or ‘not visible’ (ŋa-). The chapter commences with an outline of relevant grammatical features—case and genitive inflections, pronoun paradigm, verbal morphology, and the noun class (or gender) system. It then focuses on the noun and verb markers, explaining their meaning and function, paying particular attention to the non-visible ŋa- forms. These may describe something only known from its noise, something which has just passed out of sight but is still audible, something neither visible or audible, or something remembered from the past. In addition, spirits are always described with the non-visual marker, even if they can be seen. (Note that all the examples are taken from texts, rather than being constructed or elicited.)