Why can Aboriginal English be viewed as a unique variety of English?

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“Why can Aboriginal English be viewed as a unique variety of English?”

 

Australian Aboriginal English is one of many varieties of English prevalent throughout the English-speaking world. It is the first and often the only language of Aborigines in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal English has evolved in two ways; the first way was through a pidgi...n English used by English settlers and native Aborigines developing into a creole which is highly distinctive from Standard Australian English (the basilectal variety), and the other way was through a hybridisation of the pidgin with Standard Australian English. Many of the features of Aboriginal English, which were brought about by the influence of Aboriginal languages, are not found in any other English variety, which allows it as a whole to be viewed as a unique variety.

 

There are many phonological features in Aboriginal English distancing it from Received Pronunciation - which we will consider here as a benchmark - and are not found in many other varieties of English. The voiced dental fricative [ð] is replaced by the voiced alveolar stop [d] as Aboriginal languages do not have the [ð] sound; the word ‘that’ would be pronounced as /dæt/ instead of /ðæt/. The labio-dental fricatives [f] and [v] are replaced by their bilabial stop counterparts [p] and [b], so an Aborigine would say /baɪt/ as opposed to /faɪt/ for the word ‘fight.’ Dropping of the [h] is also prevalent in Aboriginal speech in that the word ‘hat’ would be pronounced as /æt/. Whilst individual features may be found in the phonologies of various other varieties of English, not many languages would have the same combination of features, which allows us to say that the phonology of Aboriginal English is near, if not unique.

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Aboriginal English has items in their lexicon which would be found almost nowhere else in the world, and it has certain syntactic features distancing it from most English varieties. A characteristic lexeme in Aboriginal English is ‘fella,’ a shortening of ‘fellow,’ which pertains to a person.  The word for policeman in Aboriginal English is ‘monatj’ in Western Australia and ‘booliman’ in Queensland. Other characteristic lexemes include ‘mob’ (a group of people) and ‘whitefella’ (a white person). A morphological feature is the absence of the plural morpheme ‘-s’ in certain words, wherein the phrase ‘seven miles’ would be replaced instead ...

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