Phraseology and Culture in English

2. Some aspects of the vernacularisation of English by aboriginal 
communities
When the British began to occupy Australia in 1788 the Indigenous popula-
tion of perhaps 300,000 people spread unevenly across the continent were 
speakers of an estimated 250 languages and perhaps as many dialects. Lan-
guage / dialect groups were relatively self-contained, although unified by a 
conceptual framework within which land, language and social organisation 
were mutually reinforcing. English did not at first readily gain a foothold in 
Indigenous communities. However, it was not long before the local popula-
tions in the vicinity of Sydney began to be outnumbered by the immigrants. 
Rapid expansion of the immigrant population to other areas led to the dis-
placement of Aboriginal communities and the disruption of the ecology 
which had kept land, language and law in a mutually supportive balance. 
The strength of Indigenous languages, then, came under threat early in the 
colonial period (Walsh 1993: 2) and Indigenous communities came to be 
increasingly dependent on some form of English-based communication for 
their survival. 
English and Aboriginal languages came together first in unsystematic 
jargons used by speakers, both Aboriginal and immigrant, who incorpo-
rated elements of both languages in their interactions. In different places, 
the jargon stage was succeeded by one or more of three other stages which 
Mühlhäusler (1986) has identified as typical of such language contact situa-
tions: stabilisation (or pidginisation), expansion (or creolisation) and re-
structuring (or de-pidginization / -creolization) (Mühlhäusler 1979) in the 
direction of the English superstrate. 
It has been argued by Troy (1990, 1994) that, as the early jargons used 
in New South Wales began to stabilise around the beginning of the 19th 
century, a pidgin emerged in two sociolects, one used by Aboriginal speak-
ers and showing more Aboriginal language influence and the other used by 
non-Aboriginal speakers. It was, then, already apparent at this stage that 
pidgin was able to perform the function of a medium of intra-group com-
munication among Aboriginal communities. This function was an important 
factor underlying the widespread use of New South Wales Pidgin and its 
eventual movement north, south and west across the continent. This pidgin, 
adopted for Aboriginal communicative purposes, was, we would argue, 
(see further Malcolm 2000) the precursor of the Aboriginal English which 
was eventually to emerge, through processes of restructuring and leveling, 
as the Australia-wide medium of pan-Aboriginal communication. 

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Multiword units in Aboriginal English
377
What Rigsby calls “vernacularization” can, then, be seen as an ongoing 
process which has gone on as Aboriginal speakers have interfaced with 
English, employing it, in large part, in their own communities for new func-
tions, and bringing about its modification through pidginisation, creolisa-
tion, restructuring and borrowing, as well as through normal language-internal 
processes of phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic change. At every 
stage, the process has been informed by Aboriginal understandings of their 
shared history and worldview.