Studies I Want to Do
English loanwords into Indigenous Australian languages⭐
I'd like to do a study into how English words have been loaned into Indigenous languages, both to see how words are loaned, and to see what it can tell us about what Australian English dialects were like during the colonial era. Take the southern Badimaya word marran, for example: it means "sheep", and comes from the English word mutton. The Badimaya would have got this word from contact with Australian workers in the mid to late 1800's: the kinds of people whose accents and phonology we have absolutely no records of. All we know is that they probably sounded like their ancestors: lower-/working-class people from the British Isles. That doesn't tell us a whole lot. And yet, if we look at the Badimaya word marran, we can tell a few things about what the common speech of the time and place would've sounded like.
For one, the consonant in the middle has not been transferred into Badimaya as a stop, /d/. Rather, it has been transferred as an alveolar tap, /ɾ/. This probably means that these settlers exhibited flapping, rendering the /t/ in mutton as [ɾ]; and thus, Badimaya (which has /ɾ/ as its own phoneme) recieved it as a phonemic /ɾ/.
We can also tell that the speech of these early Aussies must have had the FOOT-STRUT Split. This isn't that big of a revelation, but it's still good that this loanword can provide evidence for this assumption. Badimaya had three vowel phonemes: /i/, /ᴀ/, and /u/. We can see from other Badimaya (and wider Kartu) loanwords, such as walybala (meaning "white person", from Australian English whitefella) that any relatively low vowels in English tend to be loaned into Badimaya as their singular low vowel phoneme, /ᴀ/. In this case, English /ɛ/ has been recieved as Badimaya /ᴀ/. We can also see from another loanword how Badimaya recieves the English /ʊ/ vowel: English bullock /bʊlək/ gives Badimaya bulugu /bulugu/. As we would have assumed anyway, English /ʊ/ is recieved as Badimaya /u/.
So we can assume, then, that if the early Aussie settlers with which the Badimaya had contact had the FOOT-STRUT Split, and rendered the ⟨u⟩ in mutton as /ʌ/, Badimaya should recieve it as /ᴀ/. And if there is no split and the ⟨u⟩ is pronounced /ʊ/, Badimaya should recieve it as /u/. As we can see, Badimaya recieves it as /ᴀ/, and we all rejoice.
I just think that there is a lot to be learnt from these loanwords, but from what I can tell, absolutely nobdoy has ever looked into this topic in a formal capacity. I've made a list of English loanwords into Badimaya and Wajarri, along with a surface-level analysis, which you can see here.
Modern Australian English /ə/ - /ʊ/ Merger⭐
I've noticed amongst younger Australians that we tend to pronounce /ʊ/ as very central and unrounded, so that it's often totally indistinguishable from /ə/. What makes this interesting is that in my speech, this pronunciation of /ʊ/ as [ə] is unacceptable in certain words. I'm fine to pronounce good/gʊd/ as [gəd], but saying Buddha /bʊdə/ as [bəɾə] is unacceptable (and vice versa, with [gʊd] feeling unnatural). I wanna look into this more, and find out of younger Australian English is undergoing some sort of lexical diffusion-involving /ə/ - /ʊ/ merger.
Decline of Australian Linking/Intrusive R?
I think it's becoming less common. Am I wrong? Maybe.
Was Early Australian English Rhotic?⭐
I summarise my thoughts on this whole topic here. Let's just say, I am extremely passionate about this topic, which sucks because information on it is so sparse.
The Atlas of Australian English⭐
If North American English gets its own atlas, why can't we!? I suspect that, over the next several decades, more and more regional variation will emerge in Australian English. We're seeing the beginnings of this already: Queensland English is noticeable for retaining more conservative phonology, Melbourne has the Celery-Salary Merger, Perth splits the NEAR lexical set into two syllables (which isn't actually as special as a lot of people seem to think it is), yadda yadda. When I'm older, and the dialects of Australia have diverged a little bit more, I'll do a big national study of Australian English, and write up a big atlas of its variation.
I'd also like to find a way to take ethnic variation into consideration, too, in a way that the ANAE struggled to do.
National study on the phonology of Aboriginal Australian English
Aboriginal Australian English has so many fascinating features that other Australian dialects have lost (H-dropping, H-adding, a backgliding ɢᴏᴀᴛ vowel, rhoticity(!)), as well as substrate features from Indigenous languages (stopped fricatives, altered vowel systems, treatment of pronouns). I wanna do a national survey of Australian Aboriginal English's phonology and see how it is in different regions, ages, and classes.
Follow-Up to Peter Sutton's 1989 Report on rhoticity in Adelaide Aboriginal English⭐
In 1989 Peter Sutton published a paper on the English spoken by older Aboriginal people from the coast around Adelaide, in particular its partial rhoticity. The paper is one-and-a-half pages long, and ends with a statement that boils down to "further study is needed". But it's been over 30 years now, and nobody's followed up! The people who have this old accent are getting fewer each year, but nobody has bothered to investigate them at all. The only reason I know it's still around is because a very notable and very alive community member down that way, Major "Moogy/Muggi" Sumner, still has partially rhotic speech. I absolutely need to get down there right away and do a proper, thorough investigation into the Aboriginal English of that area, and maybe also investigate its relations to the theory of past rhoticity in Australian English.
The FOAL-FALL Merger in southwestern Australian English⭐
I went on a family holiday with my girlfriend earlier this year and noticed that her two female cousins, both from the Mandurah area, both had a peculiar Foal-Fall Merger, which I'd never heard or read about before. I wanna look into it: as any sociolinguist knows, young women are the pioneers of linguistic change. I need to find out if this sound change is just an idiosyncracy of their speech, or if it's a more widespread change in their demographic; figure out its social and geographic boundaries; and put this weird little feature out into the world of linguistics.
Phonological change in Badimaya and Wajarri
I wanna compare our oldest recordings of the Badimaya and Wajarri languages to modern recordings of speakers, and see how the phonology of the languages has changed, and then see if I can figure out why those changes have happened.
Study of Australian English as spoken by children in remote towns
As I've mentioned numerous times on Rhea's Language Academy, I grew up in a town I like to call Jafton, where the local kids didn't have good access to education, and many were Indigenous. These kids had a dialect which was very grammatically divergent from standard AusEng. There were common things, like saying youse as the second person plural pronouns, but there were less common things too, such as them twos as the third person dual pronoun (dual pronouns are present in both of the local Indigenous languages, Wajarri and Badimaya), and bate as the past tense for beat (which might come from Irish English, astoundingly. It's probably unrelated though). I think these stigmatised and fascinating features should be studied, not just in Jafton but in remote towns across Australia.
Relation of Aboriginal English to dialects of English from the UK and Ireland
Like I alluded to above, a lot of features of Aboriginal English which Aussies consider to be staples of the dialect, including words such as deadly and constructions like them fellers (instead of those fellows), are also found in Irish English. I think that, if I were to look into the features of Aboriginal English, and draw parallels to dialects found in the British Isles during the 19th century, I might find some interesting parallels, which could be really interesting.
Quantifying the differences between whitefella and blackfella English across geography
So uh, it's kinda difficult for me to word. Basically, I wanna see if the differences between white/mainstream and Indigenous Australian English are more pronounced in urban areas than in rural areas. I suspect that to be the case, because I notice race relations in general seem to be worse in urban areas than in rural areas (as a very general rule, which is not at all consistently true). On the other hand, it could be totally wrong, because Aboriginal people in rural areas tend to have much broader accents. Who knows? Not me. That's why I wanna find out.
Intergenerational comparisons of the extent of the TRAP-BATH Split
I wanna see if the TRAP-BATH Split is different across age groups within the same area. Most analyses of variation in the Australian TRAP-BATH Split have been done in regards to geography, but I want to see if there is any age difference. This is because my mother grew up in Perth during the 70's and has a much more advanced TRAP-BATH Split than most Perthers my age. I wanna know why! It can't be because of her British heritage, because her parents are Welsh don't have the TRAP-BATH Split at all. I don't understand!!
Intergenerational comparisons of the GROAN-GROWN "Split"⭐
So I'm reading this article about the GROAN-GROWN "Split" in New Zealand English (the paper talks about how it's probably actually just a conditioned avoidance of the TOW-TOE Merger, rather than a split like some people have claimed), and they say at some point that a study by Bradley and Bradley (1985), which I am totally unable to find, says that in 1985, the GROAN-GROWN Merger was actually getting less common in Australian English, with young people being more likely to distinguish them than old people (but both still being in a vast minority of speakers). This really confused me for a bit, because my (layperson) understanding of the situation was that middle-aged (or older) people distinguished them very frequently, and young people only did it occasionally. For example, my girlfriend (20) says that "grown" and "groan" are homophones, and pronounces them as such most of the time (though I have heard her say "grown" disyllabically on one occasion. When prompted to repeat herself, she said "grown" with one syllable). Meanwhile, my parents (both born in the late 60's) both insist that they are not homophones, and that most people their age pronounce them differently. The only Australians I've ever heard pronounce "grown" and "groan" differently are older than 30 (such as a teacher at my high school, and the YouTuber Matt Parker). What's which the sudden increase in popularity with people born in and around the 70's? Why did it suddenly become unpopular again? I wanna investigate this so bad!!
The value of local non-Indigenous knowledge in the preservation of Indigenous languages
Usually, if you're trying to find out about an Indigenous language, you'll ask Indigenous people about it. However, as a member of a rural community of white pastoralists in the Midwest, I can attest to the fact that many whitefellas also have valuable knowledge on Indigenous languages. I can point specifically to an old family friend of mine, who learnt to speak Badimaya in his youth (roughly the 50's and 60's) while working with Yamajis on his family's station. Badimaya is now a moribund language, and though he can't speak it anymore, I still found in my conversations with him numerous Badimaya words that are not in any dictionary produced by linguists on the language. I'd like to do a formal study into the topic and see if I can find anything out about the value of people like this in language preservation. Maybe what I'll do is ask a buncha folks for information on their local languages and fact-check all their claims, and see if they know anything that the linguists don't.
Investigation of Indigenous toponymic suffixes
I would like to look into Indigenous toponymic suffixes to see how they relate to Indigenous languages, and maybe even figure out the meanings of some of these place names. I've done an ameteur version of this already, but I'd like to do a proper investigation into it.
Vowel mergers before L in Australian English
A lot of vowel mergers are starting to appear before L in Australian English. Some documented ones include the Hal-Howl Merger, the Full-Fool Merger, and the Dole-Doll Merger. Some of these are emerging alongside L-vocalisation, especially the latter two. I've also noticed that my girlfriend has a complete Gulf-Golf Merger, whereas I have a partial one (I say "gulf" and "golf" extremely similarly, but do not consciously think of them as sounding similar). This merger has only been properly investigated in one study, whose conclusion can basically be boiled down to "some people do it, some people don't, further study is needed." I can do that further study! In particular I wanna do a sociolinguistic investigation into these mergers, and also see how much they coencide with L-vocalisation, and furthermore whether L-vocalisation is a requirement for any of them.
Can Australians identify their own regional accents?
Almost every middle-aged Australian I know reckons that you can tell people from different Australian regions and cities apart from their accents. This is despite almost all linguists everywhere having concluded that Australian English is almost entirely geographically homogenous. I wanna do a study where I 1) find out what laypeople think of as distinctive phonological characteristics of given areas; 2) test them to see if they can correctly tell people from different regions apart, and find out what they think the identifying variables are of each accent; and finally 3) do a corpus study to see if the variables the respondants gave actually correlate to these accents, or if they are just attributing these variables by mistake and are identifying them by some other subconscious method.
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