Displayed monologues

Many of the ancestral languages of Australia’s 250+ Aboriginal cultures employ extensive avoidance registers used in speech situations involving community members with whom one is prohibited from interacting under customary law, so-called ‘avoidance relatives’. Marking in avoidance languages signals that the speaker is talking as if not in the presence of the avoidance relative, which recalls Hasegawa’s (2011)Hasegawa, Y. (2011). Soliloquy for linguistic investigation. Studies in Language 35(1), 1–40. category of formal, intentional soliloquy, or solitude speech. Because avoidance language equally serves to show to others that the speaker engages in an intentional soliloquy, I refer to this phenomenon as ‘displayed monologue’. The present study provides a first detailed description of Yalan, an avoidance language traditionally spoken by the Ngarinyin Aboriginal people of Western Australia. It reports on the pragmatics of Yalan as told by Ngarinyin Elders and highlights linguistic aspects of Yalan that are not commonly given much prominence in the wider literature on Aboriginal avoidance speech. I argue that the Ngarinyin practice of Yalan both shows the deep connection between language and social organisation, a fundamental metapragmatic understanding of the inherent dialogicity of language on the part of Yalan speakers, and a remarkable sensitivity for selecting those linguistic elements that mark an utterance as if it were solitude speech.