Inputs to NSW Pidgin

In order to reconstruct NSW Pidgin, I needed to consider the inputs both local and introduced that might have been available to the mix that created NSW Pidgin. This was no easy task because there was little modern research on which I could rely for information.

The indigenous languages which provided input to NSW Pidgin are now largely extinct. Map 4 is a recent representation of the linguistic situation in that area of NSW in which NSW Pidgin had its earliest inception. Information about the languages named on that map and other languages which might have had input to NSW Pidgin is now only available in late eighteenth or nineteenth century

manuscript or published form and a very few modern linguistic analyses. I have used this information as sources in the chapters for which they are relevant. Most

frustrating was the absence of available linguistic analyses of the languages of the

8I used this same approach in my first examination of the language contact in NSW (Troy 1985, 1990a).

Sydney region. Of particular concern was the lack of any available9 linguistic analysis of the Sydney Language which was spoken in the Port Jackson area and inland to the Hawkesbury River (Map 5). That language was the first language with which colonists had extensive contact. Evidence of its nature is only contained in a few late eighteenth and nineteenth century manuscripts and published works. In the absence of any description of that language I attempted my own (Troy 1994, 1992b, 1993a and forthcoming) and have used that work in this thesis10.

No linguists have attempted to reconstruct what languages and dialects of those languages were spoken by non-Aboriginal people in colonial NSW of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That area of inquiry is at least one entire thesis in itself and is beyond the scope of this work. Historians and other researchers of the early colonial era generally assume that because English was the official language of the colony that was the language spoken by all its non-indigenous inhabitants. This and my previous works (Troy 1985, 1990a) are the only accounts of language contact in early colonial NSW and I have focussed on contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people not language contact within the introduced population.

There are some accounts of the history of Australian English11. However, they avoid detailed analysis of the early period. Their generalisations and

oversimplifications are responsible for what is now the received tradition that Australian English is the product of a homogeneous population that basically spoke

9I say 'available' because some researchers, among them the great Capell, have done some research into those languages but their material is either in private hands and inaccessible or still held by the researchers themselves and not available to other researchers. I go into detail in my publication on the Sydney Language about the information that is available (Troy 1994).

l0That work was its own major research project and occupied a large amount of time during the researching and writing of this thesis. It was going to be an appendix to this work but its size was prohibitive and with a grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' Australian Dictionaries Project I published the work separately (Troy 1994). On Map 5 the Sydney Language is called Iyora. Linguists have used the names Iyora and Dharug as labels for the language without any substantial reason for doing so. I discuss, in some depth, my reason for using the name the 'Sydney Language' in Troy 1994.

1 ^ e e , for example, references to the works of Ramson, Baker, Morris, Romaine and Wilkes in the list of references at the end of the thesis.

Cockney English. Researchers have conceded that there were also dialects of Irish English spoken in Australia. However, they continue to make poorly substantiated claims that the dialects had little influence on the development of Australian English. Future researchers could profitably the tackle subject of the linguistics of English of early colonial Australia. They will find their task made more difficult because of the paucity of demographic information for the earliest colonial period. Records were either not kept or destroyed. However, if researchers are prepared to rely on information of the order used in this thesis they will find plenty of records for the early linguistic history of the colonial Australian population. In this work, I have done no more than consider below, and where appropriate in later chapters, possible non-indigenous inputs to NSW Pidgin. However, during the course of researching for and writing this thesis I investigated and published a paper on the languages of the Irish population in Australia (Troy 1991, 1992a). This paper is drawn upon in the discussion below.

As noted above, the input to NSW Pidgin from non-indigenous sources was from a wider range than simply English. Colonisation of NSW by England introduced a multilingual and multicultural population to the already multilingual and

multicultural indigenous population of Australia. The colonists were never a

linguistically or culturally homogeneous blend of people from England and Ireland as the received tradition would have it.

Prior to 1800, the large number of Irish already in the colony were stigmatised for both their linguistic and cultural traditions. At that time most of Ireland was still Irish-speaking. The Irish in Australia would have spoken Irish as their first language and English as a second language if they spoke it at all before their arrival in NSW. Those Irish who did speak English on arrival and those who acquired some

knowledge of it in the colony spoke it with a 'heavy brogue' (Troy 1990a). Similarly, the Scots Highlanders who came to Australia were nearly always monolingual Scots

Gaelic speakers. Celts, either Irish or Scottish Highlanders were culturally and linguistically different to the English and were ostracised equally by the colonial establishment (Prentis 1983:73).

The non-English speaking convict or free immigrants to Australia in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries behaved in much the same way that

immigrants now do. Those who needed to acquire some English in order to survive and prosper did so. However, without formal education in English they tended to speak a jargon or interlanguage English. Even people who received some formal language training in English would have retained at least the salient phonological features of their first language. Compare the English of recent migrants to Australia from non-English speaking countries.

In addition to non-English-speakers there were also English-speakers with a wide variety of dialectal and social backgrounds. Soldiers, sailors and transported

criminals were particularly important in the development of NSW Pidgin as they were drawn from all the peoples of the British Empire. Each of those social groupings spoke their own jargon and were also multicultural and multilingual people. In their travels, soldiers and sailors also spent their lives experiencing new languages and cultures. When they settled on small farms or in the urban centres of Australia as many did, they brought with them their experiences of crossing cultural barriers.