Light warlpiri

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light Warlpiri (Warlpiri rampaku) is a new development of a language discovered by the Australian teacher and professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan Carmel O'Shannessy based on Warlpiri of the Aborigines in Lajamanu in northern Australia in the Tanami desert . The nouns of this new mixed language are taken from English and Warlpiri, the verbs from Kriol. In 2013, around 350 Light Warlpiri speakers were known. However, most of them also speak the traditional Warlpiri and many of them speak English and Kriol.

History and characteristics

Light Warlpiri was probably made in the early 1980s. O'Shannessy published from 2005 that school children used a language changed from the idiom Warlpiri used there.

Only residents younger than 35 speak Light Warlpiri. O'Shanessy discovered that the students not only spoke a mixture of Warlpiri, English and Kriol, but had developed a new language, the words of which expressed new meanings. For example, “cooking” no longer means purra as in the previous Warlpiri , but now kuk; “Dinner” is no longer kuku-ju, but sapa-ju. Light Warlpiri adopts the nominal and verbal systems from different source languages. Nouns are mostly from Warlpiri or Australian English and the morphology is taken from Warlpi. Verbs and their inflections are mostly borrowed from the Kriol. It is noticeable that the modal forms of the auxiliary verbs were broken down from English and Kriolischen and thus new structures and forms emerged.

After transcribing her sound recordings, O'Shanessy published her observations and assumptions in the journal Language on June 18, 2013 . She assumes the language originated from Baby Talk . Individual toddlers, who spend the day almost entirely without adults in Lajamanu, have experimented with the language modules. Others have imitated them and eventually a new language code emerged . For the young people in Lajamanu, their new language has become an identification feature, which is how the new language stabilizes.

literature

  • Carmel O'Shannessy: Light Warlpiri: A New Language. In: Australian Journal of Linguistics , Volume 25, Issue 1, 2005.
  • Carmel O'Shannessy: The role of code-switched input to children in the origin of a new mixed language. In: Linguistics, No. 50 (2), 2012, pp. 305-340 (English; doi : 10.1515 / ling-2012-0011 ).
  • Carmel O'Shannessy: The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language. In: Language, No. 89 (2), 2013, pp. 328–354 (English; abstract ).

Web links