Children’s tongue

Language>> Children • Australia

 
Published: Wednesday 31 July 2013

imageThere are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children of a village in Australia’s Northern Territory. Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at University of Michigan, the US, has been studying the speech for over a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor a mixture of languages, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.

The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, a village of about 700 people. In all, 350 people speak the language. Many words in Light Warlpiri are derived from English or Aboriginal languages. But it is not a pidgin because a pidgin has no native speakers, nor can it be a creole, a new language that combines two separate tongues, Peter Bakker told The New York Times. Bakker is an associate professor of linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark who has published widely on language development. “These young people have developed something entirely new,” he said.

There is an elementary school in Lajamanu, but most children go to boarding school in the capital city Darwin, about 700 km away, for secondary education. The language there is English. But they continue to speak Light Warlpiri among themselves.

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