2025/06/23 by Madeleine Clews · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Lexicography and Language Studies #Australian Indigenous Culture and History
paper · doi:10.1075/eww.24027.cle
Abstract In charting the history of Australian English, little attention has hitherto been paid to Western Australia, an extremely isolated colony established in 1829, some 40 years after the First Fleet arrived on the eastern coast. Using a historical sociolinguistic third-wave perspective, this study looks at the linguistic behaviour apparent in diaries and a memoir by two sisters born in the colony in the mid-19th century, finding unconventional spellings which may signal phonological features. Different spellings for the Indigenous loan word referring to a unique local animal, codified in present-day English as quokka , also prompt further investigation of historic records, finding that the spelling and likely pronunciation of the animal’s name has changed over time. As the source language, Nyungar, has no present-day fluent speakers, the original pronunciation of the word is uncertain, but the timing of the apparent shift of its first-syllable vowel may suggest markedness levelling in an emerging dialect.