Ethnically marked ways of speaking have garnered increasing attention in sociolinguistics, although social meaning has largely been adduced indirectly through production data and perception experiments. Part of a larger project investigating ethnolinguistic variation in Toronto English, this paper presents a preliminary analysis of direct elicitation through focus groups. Participants of Italian and Chinese backgrounds provided responses to clips from sociolinguistic interviews used in a subjective reaction survey and discussed potentially ethnolectal linguistic features and Toronto English in general. Participants had mixed success in naming features associated with their ethnic backgrounds, although clips from speakers with a higher degree of orientation to their ethnic background elicited more comments and had more linguistic features identified. Phonetic features were picked up on most, although participants identified features unanticipated by the researchers. Labelling of some features as "Canadian" may reflect a lack of association with particular ethnicity or association with the majority (British/Irish descent) ethnic group. While this study supports some of the findings of earlier research, the use of focus groups adds another dimension to ethnolinguistic variation, allowing direct exploration of listener salience and offering insights into the relevance of social factors in the use of ethnic markers and the construction of identity.
The mapping between phonetic and phonological representations in Australian languages is generally a direct mapping. In phonetic realizations, vowels are predominantly singletons and these singletons are mapped phonologically to syllable nuclei. Flanking phonetic realizations are analyzed phonologically as consonants in syllable margins. The resultant syllable template is maximally CVCC. However, in nearly all Australian languages, a substantial minority of phonetic tokens involve vowel sequences: e.g. [paia]. The most direct phonological analysis of these tokens would involve diphthongs and hiatus: e.g. /sigma[pai]sigma sigma[a]sigma/. However, the standard phonological analysis is more indirect, as /sigma[pa]sigma sigma[ja]sigma/, which involves neither diphthongs nor hiatus. There has been limited evaluation of phonological analyses of phonetic vowel sequences. Kamu has an extensive range of phonetic vowel sequences and the standard phonological analysis is supported across most, but not all, of this range. Kamu is unusual among Australian languages in having a phonological hiatus opposition: e.g. /sigma[pi]sigma sigma[a]sigma/ vs /sigma[pi]sigma sigma[ja]sigma/. Therefore, it offers a rare testing ground for examining the limits on standard analyses and for evaluating the environments in which alternative analyses may be required.
Changes in migration alter the linguistic ecology of countries, giving rise to hybrid social identities and ethnically marked ways of speaking ('ethnolects'). Studies of Australian English ethnolects focus on linguistic production, but we do not know whether Australians can identify ethnicity based on speech, the social and personal characteristics they attribute to ways of speaking, and what linguistic features they pick up on. We used stimuli extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with residents of Melbourne of different backgrounds in an online verbal-guise test. Results show that listeners do perceive linguistic differences, but their ability to identify specific ethnicities is limited. Listeners rely mostly on phonetic features and their experience with individuals of particular backgrounds. Voices perceived as belonging to older waves of migration are more likely to be judged as being from Australia and speaking English well, and the association of perceived ethnicities with job types reflects socioeconomic changes in migration. Perceptions of ethnically marked ways of speaking Australian English are based on groups with similar timelines of settlement (multi-ethnolects) and intersect with other social characteristics. Coordinating similar studies of production and perception across and outside of Australia will further shed light on the sociolinguistic effects of migration.
Australia's courts operate within one of the world's most linguistically diverse contexts, home to over 300 languages including numerous Indigenous ones. Ensuring linguistic equity and procedural fairness for all language communities requires attention not only to content accuracy but also to how questions and answers are formulated and interpreted. This study examines how power is embedded and negotiated in interpreter-mediated courtroom discourse by analyzing the effects of interpreting mode, delivery condition (audio-only vs audio-visual), and language direction on pragmatic accuracy (PA). PA is operationalized through speech-style features, particularly fillers and hedges, in lawyers' questions and defendants' answers, and their potential implications for power dynamics and evaluations of witness credibility. Using a mixed-methods design combining a controlled interpreting task with a post-experiment questionnaire, the study quantifies PA and examines participants' perceptions of speech-style features under different interpreting conditions. The findings show that pragmatic rendition accuracy varies systematically by interpreting mode and language direction, with higher accuracy in consecutive interpreting and Mandarin-to-English renditions, while delivery condition shows minimal effects. By foregrounding the intersection of interpreting practice, discourse style, and technology, this paper offers practical recommendations for interpreters, legal practitioners, and policymakers striving toward inclusive and empowering courtroom processes.
Language mixing (LM) in multilingual settings has cultural, social and pragmatic functions, but attitudes to LM can vary widely, influencing language use and maintenance. While Vietnamese in Australia has been studied from several perspectives, research on attitudes toward English-Vietnamese LM remains limited. This study explores how Vietnamese Australians perceive LM in their community. Adapting the matched-guise technique, we created artificial stimuli based on natural speech, featuring monolingual Vietnamese (VN) and code-mixed (CM) guises. In a between-subjects experiment, 124 listeners recruited through online community groups reacted to guises using a five-point rating scale, with a "Don't Know" (DK) option. Analysis revealed nuanced perceptions depending on context and the trait being evaluated. CM guises were perceived more positively for professional traits but less positively for personal traits, while VN guises were perceived positively for personal traits. These results reflect English's prestige and Vietnamese's association with the community, informality and family values. Attitudes were influenced by content or topic, individual speaker differences, and the perceived purpose of the utterance. The high DK response rate for some traits underscores the complexity of attitude evaluation and its discursive nature. We recommend that future research on attitudes to LM incorporate broader rating tasks beyond linguistic factors.
This study investigates language attitudes towards Australian English speakers of different ethnic backgrounds in Sydney. A mixed-methods perception experiment with 94 listeners examined evaluations of 16 speakers from Anglo-Celtic, Chinese, Italian, and Lebanese backgrounds (including Lebanese teenagers and adults) on status, solidarity, and confidence dimensions, with a particular focus on Lebanese Australians given their continued marginalization. Ethnic identification accuracy varied substantially, with Lebanese teenagers being most accurately identified (70%) and Italians least accurately identified (20%). Statistical analyses of both perceived and actual ethnicity revealed that ethnic stereotypes strongly shaped evaluations across all traits, as supported by listener comments in the experiment. Consistent patterns across perceived and actual Lebanese ethnicity highlighted persistent stigmatization of Lebanese Australian men, especially on solidarity, with age-related differences across traits. Chinese Australians were associated with model minority stereotypes: rated higher on status but lower on confidence. Anglo-Australians received mixed evaluations, with more positive ratings based on perceived rather than actual ethnicity. Italian Australians showed perceptual ambiguity, with men rated lower on solidarity but otherwise not deviating from the overall average, suggesting changing perceptions over time. Collectively, these findings provide valuable insights into the complex interplay between perception, stereotyping, and language attitudes in Australia's multicultural society.
The Boarders' Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (BAE) comprises over 42 h of audio-recorded conversation among First Nations youth living outta country at St Mary's Hills, a boarding school in Whadjuk Nyungar Country, in the South of Western Australia. Collected as part of a sociolinguistic ethnographic study at the boarding school, the BAE features 35 young women and five young men, aged 12-17. Due to varying enrolments and cultural protocols in the community, 31 young women were followed ethnographically. All boarders hail from across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. While some are monolingual speakers of Aboriginal English, others also speak traditional languages and/or Kriol. The BAE features casual and unstructured conversations among peers and with the non-First Nations participant-observer researcher in English. As the first spoken corpus of First Nations boarders, this dataset has contributed to our understanding of the linguistic experiences of First Nations communities in mainstream institutions, and the role language plays in the construction of boarders' sociolinguistic identities as they navigate the educational system away from home. It has allowed for the exploration of boarders' variable use of phonetic and morpho-syntactic features and the social meanings underpinning linguistic variation.
The vowel inventories of Kamu and Larrakia each consist of peripheral /i/-/u/-/e/-/a/-/o/ and another non-low vowel that has not been phonetically characterized. Descriptions of similar six-vowel systems in Western Top End languages offer inconsistent accounts of the non-peripheral vowel, but no instrumental analysis has yet been conducted. Acoustic and phonological analysis reveals that the sixth vowel is best characterized as /u/ in Kamu and /i/ in Larrakia. Height and backness are the critical phonetic properties that differentiate the non-peripheral vowel from the other vowel phonemes in each language. These results enhance our understanding of the structure and properties of higher cardinality vowel systems in Australian languages, and the typology of six-vowel systems more generally.
Australian languages are not typically thought of as serializing languages, although recent research has led to serial verbs being reported for a few of them. In this paper we provide the first comprehensive study of serial verb constructions across Australian languages, resulting from a survey of 50 Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages. We find that serial verb constructions are more prevalent amongst these languages than previous research suggests. We discuss the distribution of serial verb constructions in both Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages, as well as identifying the different semantic types of serial verbs which are found in Australian languages. We then compare the Australian constructions with the broader cross-linguistic literature on serial verbs and find that serial verbs in Australian languages display some unusual features not reported elsewhere in the typological literature on serial verbs, including anti-iconic orderings, additional matching transitivity requirements and languages without motion serial verbs, despite having other types of serial verbs.
This paper presents an analysis of the marker -be in Miriwoong, a language of the non-Pama-Nyungan Jarragan family spoken in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. The analysis presented here argues that -be is semantically pluractional. The -be suffix predominantly modifies coverbs, where it functions to derive pluralized situations from coverbs which primarily receive atomic (telic and singular) readings in their unmarked forms. The form is also used to derive a small set of nominals into coverbs, with the same pluractional function. In complex predication these coverbs combine only with a select number of inflecting verbs which categorize for atelicity, namely the stative be/stay inflecting verb. This analysis proposes that the -be suffix in Miriwoong instantiates a productive alternation between morphologically unmarked atomic situations and marked plural situations. The analysis also illustrates that in Miriwoong, temporally pluractional events are necessarily atelic and there are strong links between the semantic categories of pluractionality, telicity and atomicity.
Arabic language education is a core component of study at Australian Islamic schools. Students bring highly varied proficiency and connections to Arabic, creating myriad challenges for schools in catering to these learner profiles. This article explores these issues through questionnaire and interview data collected from 45 parents with children at Australian Islamic schools. We ask whether parents who speak Arabic as their first language (L1) (i.e. whose children might be considered "heritage learners") have different expectations of Islamic school Arabic classes than parents who have other L1s. Key findings reveal that while religious practice is the primary motivation for Arabic learning across both groups, Arabic L1 parents generally have broader aspirations, including cultural maintenance and family communication. Most parents (62%) support teaching both formal (Fus-ha) and colloquial (Ammiyya) Arabic, though their reasoning differs. Arabic L1 parents often see both varieties as complementary, while parents who have other L1s view Ammiyya as a stretch goal secondary to religious literacy. Parents expressed mixed satisfaction with Arabic education in Islamic schools. While appreciating the convenience of Arabic instruction during regular school hours, many identified areas for improvement, particularly in teaching methodology and resources. Parents who have other L1s were particularly critical, highlighting challenges with mixed-ability classrooms and materials designed for native speakers.
Social and phonetic information is intricately connected. Some work used negative stereotyping towards Asian speakers to explain increased perceived accentedness when listeners believed the speaker to be Asian. However, other work has argued that listeners' experiences and expectations affect their behaviour: an Asian picture can have a facilitatory effect in an intelligibility task involving Chinese-accented speech. Most previous studies exploring the effect of speaker ethnicity recruited White listeners or did not isolate listener ethnicity and experience with a given accent. This study employed Asian native English-speaking listeners of Korean and non-Korean descent who rated the accentedness of native speakers of Korean and German in three conditions: audio-only, video-only, and audiovisual. We find that both groups of listeners rated both groups of speakers as less accented in the audiovisual and video-only conditions compared to the audio-only one. This leads us to reject the experience explanation and a negative bias against Asian speakers account as well. Our results are more consistent with a positive bias towards both in-group members and White speakers. These findings highlight the importance of including participants of different backgrounds as their behaviour may be different from that of the White majority.
The origins and development of Melbourne's large and established Greek community raise questions about language maintenance and social identity. How do Australians of Greek background negotiate and reconcile different aspects of their identities? Can Greek be maintained as a community language and what role does language play in social identity? This article compares two approaches to these questions, making use of quantitative versus qualitative analysis. First, an online survey consisting of questions related to self-categorization, language acquisition and use, and cultural values was administered to a representative sample of respondents divided by generation. Responses showed increasing convergence to hybrid social category labels, with continued acquisition and use of Greek. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants from three generations. The interviews illustrate how social identities emerge in interaction as well as the disalignment between self- and other-perception. While the two studies differed methodologically, they converged in uncovering changing patterns of language acquisition and use, the preference for hybrid social categories and continued experiences of discrimination. Despite the complementary nature of the two approaches, the convergence of results is promising and raises questions of whether Greek will continue to be viewed as an important component of social identity.
Many Australian languages exhibit kintax, the sensitivity of some part of their grammar to kinship relations obtaining between referents. Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, Arnhem Land) is one such language. Since Alpher's work in the early 1980s it has been described as exhibiting a contrast in its dual-series pronominal prefixes predominantly based on "generational harmony", opposing a "harmonic series", where referents are in even-numbered generations (siblings, grandkin, etc.) to a "disharmonic series", where they are in odd-numbered generations (e.g. parents and children). This article demonstrates that this is only one point in a much broader set of uses, including grammatical uses (disambiguating reciprocals from reflexives, indicating "convergent reference" in want-constructions) and spatial uses (converging from opposite sides). At the same time, within the kinship-based uses, there has been an apparent shift from generation-based oppositions to those organized around spousal dyads. In this way, a more abstract spatial meaning (opposite sides) is retained while being redirected to a different kinship opposition in speakers born more recently than the "classical" speakers in Alpher's study. The paper is a tribute to Barb Kelly, who was a key member of our research team on the grammar of social cognition, which supported some of the fieldwork on which this article is based.
Our contribution to the special issue in honour of Barb Kelly is a combination of personal reflections on her extraordinary life and work, discussion of her contributions to the study of gesture and other actions during young children's early language learning, and exemplification of how that work is being built upon in a current research project in which Barb was to have been a Chief Investigator. The article draws on Eve's experience as a member of the supervisory committee for Barb's (2003) PhD at UC Santa Barbara, her hosting of Barb's subsequent postdoc at Stanford University, and collaborative discussions between them over the rest of Barb's life. It also draws on Alan's experience with Barb during the planning of their new project on "Body, Language and Socialization across Cultures" (BLS). Not long before that, Barb's interest in gestures developed into a broader interest in communicative multimodality: the whole range of bodily actions that play a part in human communication, especially in interactions involving children. She also developed an interest in the "language socialization" approach, which treats children's language learning as part of a larger process in which they are inducted into particular cultures and communities. Those twin foci have been central to the BLS project. They are exemplified by Alan's contribution to the article, which examines the interplay of speech, pointing, gaze, and bodily movements in interactions between a two-and-a-half-year-old girl and her caregivers in the Ku Waru region of the Highland of Papua New Guinea, and shows how they contribute to her learning of both the complex Ku Waru demonstrative system and the clan-based system of land ownership and social identity in the region.
This paper reports on a small-scale, naturalistic corpus study of the development of children's verbal inflectional morphology in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Central Australia with a large yet regular verbal paradigm. We followed recent recommendations for initial sketch descriptions of under-resourced languages and analyzed a 5-hour corpus of caregiver-child interaction with five focus children between the ages of two and four. Results suggested three broad stages in order of emergence: children initially used verbs in imperative, present, and past tense forms; they then showed increasing lexically-specific inflectional range within this 'core group' of categories; and finally, all but one remaining member of the nine-category paradigm were observed, at around age three. Notably, a nominalizing suffix was observed early, showing comparable frequency to the core inflections in the later stage. Verbs overwhelmingly corresponded to inflected forms in all sessions, although children frequently omitted word-medial stem augment syllables in a prosodic distribution. Overgeneralization between inflectional classes was rare, with just one example identified. These results provide an indication of the pathway toward productive use of the Pitjantjatjara verbal system, and contribute to the documentation of children's communication development in Australian Indigenous languages and the growing literature on the acquisition of rich morphology.
Interactional stance-taking is among the fundamental evolutionary drivers of human communication systems. Stance, and stance-taking, are phenomena which have been studied from a variety of perspectives - at an intersection between divergent sub-disciplines of linguistic, socio-linguistic, sociological, anthropological and psychological inquiry. Non-talk actions, with a focus on gesture but also including changes in body position, have been shown to perform interactional stance-taking. In this paper we present examples that arise from naturally occurring data of participants who perform non-talk actions (including physical presence) which stop, pause or persist across time. We suggest that stance-taking can be understood by interactional co-participants as occurring through this lack of change in action, or [in]action. This paper draws on data from an ethnography and video corpus of orchestral rehearsals, an ethnography and video corpus of hospital management meetings, and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English.
This paper explores intergenerational differences in the identification of grammatical relations in Gurindji Kriol, in order to determine whether differences between adults and children are the result of an abrupt generational shift or an extended acquisition process. We analyze the identification of agents in transitive sentences using a 2AFC task where 16 agents are case-marked or not and are ordered AV/VA. The study includes 73 participants which represent four groups of Gurindji Kriol children (5, 7, 9 and 11 years old) tested in 2005 and 2016, and one control group of adults tested in 2005. The data are analyzed both diachronically (in real-time) and synchronically (in apparent-time). Our real-time analysis of the 2005 and 2016 children's data reveals differences between child groups but no differences across time, suggesting their patterns of agent identification can be interpreted as an acquisitional cline. Our apparent-time comparison of the combined 2005 and 2016 child and adult data show that by the age of 11 years, children have acquired an adult-like argument-marking system which relies on both case and word order.
Stephen "Shorty" Jamieson is 37 years into a life sentence arising from an alleged confession documented only by an uncorroborated "verbatim record of interview" typed by detectives who arrested him in 1988. The fact that he was convicted on such flimsy evidence is not the most serious problem: this form of injustice was prevalent before mandatory electronic recording of police interviews. Far more serious is ongoing failure by the law to recognize the unfairness of his trial, despite reforms enacted, just a few years later, specifically to redress this kind of injustice. This article describes the confession evidence, and the ineffectual challenges to it in the trial (1990), appeal (1992-1993) and application for inquiry (2001). It then turns to analysis of the record of interview, revealing multiple reasons to question its authenticity. Next it examines the legal misconceptions about transcription that underlie this injustice, and shows how these live on in current times, despite the reforms of the 1990s. Finally, it amplifies calls for the law to recognize that forensic transcription requires scientific expertise - and for linguistic science to recognize that ensuring fair handling of transcripts of spoken language used as evidence requires theoretical innovation within the discipline.
