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Abstract

As with many First Nations peoples around the world, Australian Aboriginal peoples have suffered dispossession and continue to experience educational and socio-economic disadvantage. This narrative, however, fails to recognise their inherent strength reflected in over 65,000 years of living history in Australia. A number of factors contribute to this resilience — one receiving scant attention over the years is humour. Of those studies that have explored this, the focus has been ‘pragmatics’ (Garde, 2008), ‘performance’ (Austin, 2016), and ‘code-switching’ McConvell (1988), but only with adult speakers.

In this paper, we explore the humour of Australian Aboriginal primary school-aged students as they have fun, joke and ‘kid around’. The focus of this study are cohorts living in rural, regional and remote locations of Australia. Specifically, naturalistic language data were collected in seven schools located within the State of Western Australian. Two hundred and thirty children and their teachers were recorded both in their classrooms and playgrounds. Whilst earlier studies incorporated codeswitching to reflect how the speakers’ use their various linguistic codes (Malcolm, 2000), in this study, reflecting the current state of the field, we base our analysis on translanguaging and the fluid movement that occurs between languages. The findings show how these students draw on their full linguistic repertoire to have fun and to interact humorously with each other — moving between Australian Aboriginal English, traditional languages, Standard Australian English and Kriol (i.e., a creole used in some remote locations of Australia).

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2026-05-05
2026-05-11

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/content/journals/10.1075/aral.25042.oli
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Kidding around
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.25042.oli
/content/journals/10.1075/aral.25042.oli
/content/journals/10.1075/aral.25042.oli
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: translanguaging ; humour ; regional and remote ; children ; Australian Aboriginal peoples

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