2025/04/03 by Monika Bednarek, T. C. Cameron · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Multilingual Education and Policy #Discourse Analysis in Language Studies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/07268602.2025.2501214
openalex publication_date 2025/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article offers a linguistic perspective on Australian television series that include significant involvement by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander screen creatives, and that centre on Aboriginal characters. We analyze transcripts from 16 television series from 2012 to 2021, which come from both comedy and drama genres. We highlight some of the ways in which language is used in these television series to bring different types of representation to viewers’ attention – representations which may often be missing or backgrounded in other types of series. Using both corpus linguistics and discourse analysis we discuss four different types of representation in the corpus: (1) representations of Aboriginal English; (2) representations of culture(s); (3) representations of ignorance/racism; and (4) representations of colonization. We provide both quantitative and qualitative information about these representations and give examples for each type of representation. Our conclusion draws out the possible implications for education.