Kinship loanwords in Indigenous Australia, before and after colonization

Abstract

This paper begins with a discussion of medieval kinship loanwords into English from French. As well as illustrating how these terms (uncle, aunt, cousin, nephew etc.) are drawn from outside the lineal core of the family, they also show how the takeover from earlier Anglo-Saxon terms was not immediate but went through a phase of plurality or overlay of some centuries in which there was kin-switching between the old and new systems, parallel to code-switching, a phenomenon also to be discussed in relation to Australian Indigenous languagesas they borrow kinship terms. As well as these collateral terms highlighted in English, affinal (in-law) terms are also commonly loanwords in many languages. Turning to Australia, examples are given of long-distance affinal Wanderwörter (travelling words), including ramparra word for ‘mother-in-law’ which turned into lamparr(a) ‘father-in-law’ as it travelled east and exploded across the Northern Territory in the last 150 years. In contrast, linguistic prehistory can show us examples of local borrowing of grandparent kinship terms to fill gapsas systems change, and rarer examples of more wholesale local borrowing. Moving on to the more recent era when English and Pidgin-Kriol have had impact on the situation, terms like uncle and aunt when used in Indigenous contexts tend at first to have the ‘Aboriginal’ meanings ‘mother’s brother’ and ‘father’s sister’ but with increasing kin-switching into the wider English mean-ings. Pre-existing features of some Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirrpre dispose them to move in this direction but this language and others add hybrid compounds like cousin-ngamu(mother’s brother’s daughter).‘Cousin’ is most often cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’ child) in earlier stages of Pidgin-Kriol based on traditional kin-classification, but in an area in the Northern Territory it also intriguingly means ‘mother-in-law’, because this feature was adopted from a language around the Queensland border on the advancing eastward path of Pidgin-Kriol and the cattle industry in the late nineteenth century. Show more