A language is born

Warlpiri rampaku is spoken only by the young in an isolated village of 700 in north Australia

Nicholas bakalar

There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born,created by children living in a remote village in Australia. Carmel OShannessy,a linguist at the University of Michigan,US,has been studying the young peoples speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole,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,an isolated village of about 700 people in Australias Northern Territory. In all,about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue.

Everyone in Lajamanu speaks strong Warlpiri,an aboriginal language unrelated to English and shared with about 4,000 people in several Australian villages. Many also speak Kriol,an English-based creole developed in the late 19th century and widely spoken in northern Australia among aboriginal people of many different native languages. The village,established by the government in 1948 without the consent of the people who would inhabit it,is about 550 miles south of Darwin,and the nearest commercial centre is Katherine,about 340 miles north. Contact with English is quite recent. In the 2006 census,almost half the population was under 20,and the Australian government estimates that by 2026 the number of indigenous people aged 15 to 64 will increase to 650 from about 440 today.

People in Lajamanu often engage in what linguists call code-switching,mixing languages together or changing from one to another as they speak. And many words in Light Warlpiri are derived from English or Kriol.

But Light Warlpiri is not simply a combination of words from different languages. Peter Bakker,an associate professor of linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark who has published widely on language development,says Light Warlpiri cannot be a pidgin because a pidgin has no native speakers. Nor can it be a creole,because a creole is a new language that combines two separate tongues.

Light Warlpiri is clearly a mother tongue, he said.

OShannessy offers this example,spoken by a four-year-old: Nganimpa-ng gen wi-m si-m worm mai aus-ria. We also saw worms at my house. It is easy enough to see several nouns derived from English. But the -ria ending on aus house means in or at,and it comes from Warlpiri. The -m ending on the verb si see indicates that the event is either happening now or has already happened,a present or past but not future tense that does not exist in English or Warlpiri. This is a way of talking so different from either Walpiri or Kriol that it constitutes a new language.

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The development of the language,OShannessy says,was a two-step process. It began with parents using baby talk with their children in a combination of the three languages. But then the children took that language as their native tongue by adding radical innovations to the syntax,especially in the use of verb structures,that are not present in any of the source languages.

Why a new language developed at this time and in this place is not entirely clear. It was not a case of people needing to communicate when they have no common language,a situation that can give rise to pidgin or creole. OShannessy suggests that subtle forces may be at work. I think that identity plays a role, she said. After children created the new system,it has since become a marker of their identity as being young Warlpiri from the Lajamanu Community.