Australian Creole – Wikipedia

The Australian Creole , called crying By its speakers, is a language of Australia, a Creole that has developed to facilitate the relationships between European settlers in Australia and the aborigines of northern regions. Even if we notice similarities with English as to vocabulary, kriol has a distinct syntactic structure as well as grammar, we can therefore speak of a language proper.

According to the 2016 census, 7,155 people said they can speak Creole and 7,253 people ^{[ first ]} declared the speaking at home ^{[ 2 ]} .

The installation of Europeans in the northern territory was done over a period of about forty years. This colonization settled permanently from 1870, we note the arrival of the English language on the spot, but also of the Chinese language. In order to communicate between these two groups and the local Aborigines, a pidgin developed throughout the territory. From 1900, this pidgin of the northern territory: Northern Territory Pidgin English (Ntpe) spread and was well understood (understanding that no one spoke pidgin as a mother tongue, a pidgin can become a language only with the evolution of the language).

For the pidgin of the northern territory to be creolized, therefore that the language can adapt to speakers and become a 100% independent language, a new linguistic community should develop in the future area of ​​the language. The first place in this process was the mission of Roper River (Ngukurr), where breeding points were established, as well as residential areas.

During this period, relations between natives and populations of European origin were tense, the settlers spoke of “war of extermination” ( war of extermination ); The Aborigines were keen to valiantly defend their lands. In any case, the land could be entered by the colonists when a company specializing in breeding took control of most of a region. The colonists have been more determined to grab the land of the Aboriginal people by leading expeditions.

European installation and land seizure have particularly weakened the indigenous population, which represents one of the major factors for the development of Creole, in fact this radical social change was accompanied by major communication difficulties.

The second condition for the development of this Creole was the creation of a new linguistic community, which appeared when the Anglican missionaries established a refuge for the Aborigines in the Roper River region in 1908. This led to what around 200 people gather Coming from 8 different aboriginal peoples, who therefore spoke of different languages. Even if adults were multilingual, children, due to frequent meetings or rallies around ceremonies, had already acquired a new language. The pidgin language of the northern territory. During their lives, these children, first natives of the new community, were the actors in the development of Pidgin as a full -fledged language.

Although the relations between missionaries and aborigines were friendly, it is not the very missions that were the source of the development of Kriol. In fact, they tried to introduce standard English as a usual language of the mission. Children used the “colonial” language in class, and English was the language to address missionaries.

Kriol actually flourished. It is truly a Creole because kriol has become a mother tongue for a number of its speakers, it has been the subject of cultural appropriation, using the meeting of two worlds with differentiated traditions and using both of the two linguistic bases ” choral (Aboriginal name of Aborigines, which means “human being”) and European.

Kriol was not recognized as such as a language before the 1970s, mainly because of linguistic “academism” which disdained what it considered as an “incorrect form” of English rather than a true language.

• Kriol is particularly widespread in the Katherine region, but there are few differences between the varieties of Kriol spoken in certain regions and certain Kriol speakers prefer to refer to their language using the local name. In any case, from a linguistic point of view the varieties of the kriol are very close. There is a debate on the differentiation of names of the varieties of the kriol to show the different social senses of the language or even that these varieties must come together behind the “Kriol” banner. These differences are not very important: Mari Rhydwen compares this debate to what the varieties of British, American and Australian English are.

• The Kriol of Roper River (Ngukurr) is also spoken in Barunga and in the region of Daly River. Speakers speak a variety that is completely intelligible to Creophones, but speakers in the Daly River region do not consider themselves the speakers of Kriol. There is the question of whether these varieties must be perceived as differentiated forms of Kriol to strengthen the respective identities of the regions concerned or if these varieties must be seen as kriol and therefore have a better opportunity to create programs for education bilingual.

The problem facing several communities in northern Australia is that Créolophone children are considered to be speaking English, but a “bad English”; So they do not receive education with English as a second language. On the other hand, because we do not perceive Creolophones as having a mother tongue, they are refused access to education in their traditional language.

The only official bilingual Australian bilingual program in Kriol is in Barunga, which was built during the first-minister of Gough Whitlam from 1972 to 1975, and successfully introduced Kriol as a means and object of study. The financing of the Australian federal government is too low for a further development of Kriol programs. Even if the kriol is widely spoken (for an aborigine language), the transition to writing is at least, with the exception of the Bible. This also comes from the low literacy rate in kriol, the same goes for literacy in English, this means that traditional myths are not recorded in written form either. What can happen is that Ngukurr’s people must rely on the texts of Barunga, which can reduce the identity distinction between the two linguistic groups. In any case, Aboriginal cultures do not have the tradition of establishing itself in writing, so the lack of written versions of texts can be understood as an integral part of oral nature to tell stories among the Aborigines.

Bibliography [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• Harris, John (1993) Losing and gaining a language : the story of Kriol in the Northern Territory . In Walsh, M & Yallop, C (Eds) Language and culture in Aboriginal Australia; Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

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