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Article published In: International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 5:1 (2018) ► pp.94–111

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Cultural conceptualisations of language and country in Australian Indigenous languages

 | Monash University
Published online: 18 May 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.17006.rus
Abstract
This article presents a Cultural Linguistics perspective on the enduring and multifaceted relationship between people, language and country in Indigenous Australia. It builds on a substantial body of work in Cultural Linguistics that has examined the cultural conceptualisations present in Aboriginal English, but shifts the focus to exploring how such conceptualisations are also encoded in ancestral Indigenous languages. The article provides linguistic and ethnographic data from a number of Indigenous language groups to explicate the notions of language as a ‘cultural schema’ and country as a ‘cultural category’ in Indigenous languages. It also posits a number of conceptual metaphors that relate to country and language, namely country is a sentient being, country is a rational being, and country is a linguistically competent being.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.‘Language’ as a cultural schema in Indigenous Australia
    • 2.1Language and territoriality
    • 2.2Rights to language
    • 2.3Language and kinship
      • 2.3.1Dyad and tri-relational kinship terminology
      • 2.3.2Respect registers
      • 2.3.3Non-human kinship
  • 3.‘Country’ as a cultural category in Indigenous Australia
  • 4.Cultural conceptual metaphors relating to language and country
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • References
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