Abstract
This chapter explores how speakers in Maningrida, a linguistically diverse Indigenous community in northern Australia, negotiate and evaluate their language practices within ‘hybrid spaces’ (i.e. spaces shaped by the interaction of diverse groups, institutions and ways of speaking). The analysis draws on data from two settings – a public school event, and a football match – and I consider the ways in which a translanguaging lens may provide insights into the interactional and socio-psychological realities of lived multilingualism in Maningrida. The major focus of the chapter pertains to Burarra/English mixing. I discuss the nature and functions of this language practice, and note that while speakers appear to ‘soft assemble’ their linguistic resources to fit the communicative situation at hand, there are also observable constraints exerted by the morphosyntax of the contributing codes. This practice are situated against the backdrop of long-standing multilingualism and language ideologies in the Arnhem Land region. The chapter evaluates translanguaging as a possible useful addition to the nomenclatural and analytical toolbox of researchers in the Australian Indigenous context, and as an important step towards decolonising understandings of local language practice, and further provides critiques and suggestions for strengthening the model’s descriptive potential.
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Notes
- 1.
Sign language is used in the region by Indigenous deaf people and in a variety of cultural contexts, including for communication across distance and in politeness and respect strategies (Adone & Maypilama, 2014; Carew & Green, 2017). I use the term speaker/signer when referring to communicators in Maningrida in reflection of the centrality of non-verbal communication, but also in an effort to minimise the oral language bias of linguistic work more generally.
- 2.
Underlining generally indicates Burarra lexical material but, as will be explained, sometimes indicates other non-English features. Glosses are not provided in the extracts for the sake of brevity. Where relevant, glosses are included in the discussion of particular features.
- 3.
One feature associated with Gun-nartpa here, for example, is michpa ‘like; similar to’. In other Burarra dialects this is usually realised as minypa.
- 4.
- 5.
I acknowledge that there are models being developed within the code-switching literature that are able to handle some of the complexities of this kind of mixing, e.g. Dorleijn’s (2017) ‘dense code-switching’, which treats these practices as constituting a new variety that may have innovative features.
- 6.
Although unlike these scholars, I do not dispense with the notion of discrete languages entirely.
- 7.
Instead, mixing between traditional languages is highly ‘marked’ and strategic, and switches tend to occur outside the clause (i.e. it is not, in my opinion, usually of the translanguaging kind (cf. Haviland’s (1982) mixing as an unmarked register). Differences of this kind have been noted elsewhere, e.g. the Amazonian Vaupés region, where indigenous contact has resulted in language maintenance, grammatical diffusion, and limited lexical borrowing, while colonially-mediated contact has tended towards language shift, code-switching, and lexical borrowing (Epps, 2018).
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Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Maningrida community, and especially to Abigail Carter, Doreen Jinggarrabarra, Cindy Jin-marabynana, Rebecca Baker, Joseph Diddo, Alistair James, Stanley Djalarra Rankin, Mason Scholes and Jessie Webb. Thanks also to Margaret Carew, Felicity Meakins, Ruth Singer, Rebecca Green and Gillian Wigglesworth for their helpful conversations, to two anonymous reviewers for their time and their most constructive insights, and to Gerardo Mazzaferro for initiating this volume. This work has been funded since 2015 by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (C.I. Felicity Meakins, University of Queensland), the Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society project (C.I. Terje Lohndal) at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology, and a University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grant (C.I. Jill Vaughan).
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Vaughan, J. (2018). Translanguaging and Hybrid Spaces: Boundaries and beyond in North Central Arnhem Land. In: Mazzaferro, G. (eds) Translanguaging as Everyday Practice. Multilingual Education, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94851-5_8
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