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“We was goin’ kangaroo shooting”

Was/were variation in Australian Aboriginal English

ORCiD logo with link | University of Western Australia
 | University of Western Australia
 | Queen Mary University of London
 | University of Western Australia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with The University of Western Australia.

Published online: 13 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.25037.fra
Abstract
This paper examines was/were 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 was 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 we favouring levelled was, an effect operational for speakers who grew up in monolingual homes. Additionally, levelled was is employed across social groups to assert their Aboriginal identity in a white-led institution.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Was/were variation across World Englishes
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data
      • 3.1.1St Mary’s hills and its boarders
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (67)
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