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Article In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Revive with a neighbour not a stranger

Remorphification and the potential role of related languages in language revival contexts

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Abstract
Extensive gaps present in the records of no longer spoken Australian languages present a hindrance for Aboriginal people wishing to revive their ancestral languages. This paper introduces remorphification as a tool for language revival in contexts where there is limited morpho-syntactic information; exploring how related and typologically similar languages can assist in such contexts. It contrasts texts created via remorphification, relexification and substitution, discussing the impact that these different approaches have on the formation of texts. The paper also investigates the way in which metaphors such as sleeping diminish the role of colonial practices in language loss.
In largely isolating languages such as English, many words consist of a single morpheme. In contrast, Pama-Nyungan languages are agglutinating: they form words by stringing together multiple morphemes, each morpheme with a distinct grammatical function and/or semantic designation. Thus, the English phrase on its branch would be expressed in Gunditjmara as a single word wurk i-nyung ‘branch-locative-3sg.possessive’. Texts created via relexification of an English substratum are more likely to be isolating, containing features — such as prepositions — that are not typical of Pama-Nyungan languages. Texts formed via substitution more closely resemble the grammatical structure of the ancestral language but are restricted to the type of sentences recorded in the historical record. Remorphification results in analytic texts that are typically Pama-Nyungan; however, the closer the typological (usually, but not necessarily, genetic) relationship between the (m)alpa wangka (helper/friend languages) and the revival language, the more closely the created text will resemble the ancestral language.
Article outline
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Languages discussed in this paper
    • 1.2Some terminology from language revival contexts
    • 1.3Agency
    • 1.4The sleeping metaphor
    • 1.5Language contact: Relexification, pidgins, Creoles, mixed languages, and hybrids
  • 2.Discussion
    • 2.1Relexification: A means by which a pidgin is raised
    • 2.2Sentence manipulation and substitution drills
    • 2.3Remorphification
      • 2.3.1Remorphification: Music (Ngundakati)
      • 2.3.2The phrase ngathuk-ngalina
      • 2.3.3Forming sentences with the phrase ngathuk-ngalina
    • 2.4The relationship between the (m)alpa wangka and reclaimed language
      • 2.4.1Some implications of typological divergences
      • 2.4.2Choosing a (m)alpa wangka
      • 2.4.2Typologically more ideal (m)alpa wangka for Gunditjmara
    • 2.5(M) alpa wangka in the semantic domain
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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