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Abstract

This paper examines / variation in a corpus of naturalistic Australian Aboriginal English (AE), a post-invasion contact-based variety spoken by First Nations people in Australia. While a tendency towards levelling was attested in earlier descriptions of AE, quantitative sociolinguistic studies are yet to be offered. We draw on the speech of 31 First Nations girls aged 12–17 from across Western Australia and the Northern Territory, collected as part of a sociolinguistic ethnography at a boarding school in Southwest Western Australia. We find that most of the linguistic factors considered in the existing literature are not significant when social factors are included. Subject type emerges as the only significant linguistic constraint, with the first plural pronoun favouring levelled , an effect operational for speakers who grew up in monolingual homes. Additionally, levelled is employed across social groups to assert their Aboriginal identity in a white-led institution.

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2026-03-13
2026-04-21

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“We was goin’ kangaroo shooting”
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.25037.fra
/content/journals/10.1075/eww.25037.fra
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: grammatical variation ; ethnography ; identity ; Aboriginal English ; sociolinguistic variation ; social meaning

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