Outta country: The Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English

Burden of the Beast

Learning through standard English: Cognitive implications for post-pidgin/-creole speakers

(1) Background: Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a variety known to differ in various ways from the mainstream, but to date very little phonetic analysis has been carried out. This study is a description of L1 Aboriginal English in southern Australia, aiming to comprehensively describe the acoustics of vowels, focusing in particular on vowels known to be undergoing change in Mainstream Australian English. Previous work has focused on static measures of F1/F2, and here we expand on this by adding duration analyses, as well as dynamic F1/F2 measures. (2) Methods: This paper uses acoustic-phonetic analyses to describe the vowels produced by speakers of Aboriginal Australian English from two communities in southern Australia (Mildura and Warrnambool). The focus is vowels undergoing change in the mainstream variety–the short vowels in KIT, DRESS, TRAP, STRUT, LOT, and the long vowel GOOSE; focusing on duration, and static and dynamic F1/F2. As part of this description, we analyse the data using the sociophonetic variables gender, region, and age, and also compare the Aboriginal Australian English vowels to those of Mainstream Australian English. (3) Results: On the whole, for duration, few sociophonetic differences were observed. For static F1/F2, we saw that L1 Aboriginal English vowel spaces tend to be similar to Mainstream Australian English but can be analysed as more conservative (having undergone less change) as has also been observed for L2 Aboriginal English, in particular for KIT, DRESS, and TRAP. The Aboriginal English speakers had a less peripheral vowel space than Mainstream Australian English speakers. Dynamic analyses also highlighted dialectal differences between Aboriginal and Mainstream Australian English speakers, with greater F1/F2 movement in the trajectories of vowels overall for AAE speakers, which was more evident for some vowels (TRAP, STRUT, LOT, and GOOSE). Regional differences in vowel quality between the two locations were minimal, and more evident in the dynamic analyses. (4) Conclusions: This paper further highlights how Aboriginal Australian English is uniquely different from Mainstream Australian English with respect to certain vowel differences, and it also highlights some ways in which the varieties align. The differences, i.e., a more compressed vowel space, and greater F1/F2 movement in the trajectories of short vowels for AAE speakers, are specific ways that Aboriginal Australian English and Mainstream Australian English accents are different in these communities in the southern Australian state of Victoria.

Descriptions of Australian Aboriginal English list the neutralisation of the Standard English contrast between so-called voiced and voiceless stops as one characteristic feature. This paper reports on the results of an acoustic analysis of data collected in a production task by monolingual speakers of Standard Australian English in Sydney, of Aboriginal English on Croker Island, Northern Territory, and bilingual speakers of Iwaidja/Aboriginal English and Kunwinjku/Aboriginal English on Croker Island. The results show that average values for Voice Onset Time, the main correlate of the “stop voicing contrast” in English, and Closure Duration collected from Aboriginal speakers of English do not significantly differ from that of speakers of Standard Australian English, irrespective of language background. This result proves that the stop contrast is not neutralised by these Aboriginal speakers of English. However, it can be shown that phonetic voicing manifesting itself in Voice Termination Time is a prevalent and characteristic feature of Aboriginal English on Croker Island. This feature aligns Aboriginal English on Croker Island with local Aboriginal languages and differentiates it from Standard Australian English.

Whither the Aborigine

This thesis is a study of students’ experiences as learners of Standard Australian English (SAE) as an additional language or dialect in early years classrooms in an Australian Aboriginal community. It takes as its starting point reports that English‐lexified varieties spoken in many Aboriginal communities are not explicitly recognised as systematically different from SAE within the formal education system. That is, that the status and needs of Aboriginal students as learners of SAE may be ‘invisible’ in classroom interactions which make up a large part of these children’s educational experiences (Angelo & Hudson 2018; Dixon & Angelo 2014; McIntosh, O’Hanlon & Angelo 2012; Sellwood & Angelo 2013). These issues were explored through two research questions and five sub‐questions: 1) How are students choosing between variants in their linguistic repertoires as they talk during class time at school, a. Do students choose variants associated with SAE or the community variety according to interlocutor, topic of talk or the type of activity they are engaged in?; b. Are there changes in students’ rate of use of SAE and non‐SAE variants in their speech in the classroom over three years? 2) To what extent, and how, do teachers present SAE (as an additional language/dialect) as a learning focus for students in lessons, a. What are the norms and expectations for students’ ways of speaking in the classroom, as revealed through teachers, teacher aides and students’ practices?; b. Is SAE (AL/D) presented as a learning focus in literacy lessons, and how?; c. Is SAE (AL/D) presented as the main content to be learned in any lessons, and how? Data for the study was collected over three years, following two cohorts of students in the first four years of school, in an Aboriginal community in Queensland. Usual classroom lessons were audio and video recorded with the aim of capturing as closely as possible what would have been happening if researchers had not been present. Research Question 1 was investigated through two complementary approaches, providing qualitative and quantitative analysis. Variationist sociolinguistic methods were used to consider how linguistic and social factors influenced students’ choices between linguistic variants associated with the community variety and SAE, and the effect of change over time. Variation in absence and presence of the verb ‘be’ in the children’s classroom talk was taken as a case study for the focus of this analysis. Results showed that literacy task related topics of talk strongly favoured presence of the verb ‘be’. However, contrary to expectation, ‘be’ presence in the children’s classroom talk was not favoured with SAE‐speaking teacher addressees. The analysis did not show the expected increase in rate of ‘be’ presence with an increased length of time at school. Research Question 1 was additionally explored using a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach. CA analysis of classroom interactions showed ways in which students oriented to the social meanings of different ways of talking. In literacy tasks, children’s self‐talk showed how they navigated between variants in their linguistic repertoires, and children demonstrated in their interactions with peers and teachers that they associated certain words with particular ways of talking in the community. Research Question 2 was explored through analysis of classroom interactions from a CA perspective. Analysis revealed little explicit orientation from teachers to students being speakers of the community variety, or learners of SAE, with students being instead treated to a considerable extent as already speakers of SAE. Lessons ostensibly targeted at explicitly teaching linguistic forms were found to focus on topic‐specific applications of SAE words to academic tasks. The context where teachers attended most to non‐SAE aspects of students’ speech was in interactions centred on reading and writing tasks. However, in these interactions, there was evidence that students were treated primarily as learners of literacy, rather than learners of SAE. Both of the methodological approaches, CA and variationist sociolinguistics, drew on naturally occurring classroom data to provide insight into young Aboriginal students’ linguistic experiences encountering SAE as the medium of instruction at school. These analyses contribute new material to previous observations regarding the level of acknowledgement of Aboriginal SAE as an additional language or dialect learners at school (Dixon & Angelo 2014; McIntosh, O’Hanlon & Angelo 2012; Sellwood & Angelo 2013), providing insight into the visibility of these students’ existing linguistic knowledge and SAE learning needs in everyday classroom interactions central to their education.

Repeated assessments of literacy skills have shown that Aboriginal students do not achieve at the same level as their non-Aboriginal peers. Many Aboriginal students speak Aboriginal English, a dialect different from the Standard Australian English used in schools. Research shows that it is crucial for educators in bidialectal contexts to be aware of students’ home language and to adopt appropriate educational responses. For over a decade, the ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning Professional Development Program has sought to improve outcomes for Aboriginal students in Western Australia. By promoting a two-way bidialectal approach to learning, Aboriginal English is valued, accommodated and used to bridge to learning in Standard Australian English. This paper draws on a large research project, which used qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of the on-going professional development for teachers. It reports on the attitudes and understandings of teachers, with and without professional development and working in different contexts.

Influence of age and gender on triglycerides-to-HDL-cholesterol ratio (TG/HDL ratio) and its association with adiposity index

Australian Aboriginal English is a contact‐based variety spoken by 80% of First Nations people in Australia. Drawing on an original corpus of Aboriginal English collected in urban Nyungar country (Southwest Western Australia), this entry offers an overview of Aboriginal English features recorded in home settings during yarning sessions. The entry draws on this corpus to describe and exemplify distinctive phonological, grammatical, lexical, semantic and discourse‐pragmatic features. The variety of Aboriginal English captured in the corpus is closer to standardised English than other contact varieties (for example, Kriol spoken in Northern Australia). This surface structural similarity is problematic as Aboriginal English is sometimes seen as defective. This piece discusses the implications of these negative attitudes and how further knowledge of Aboriginal English may lessen linguistic discrimination and improve the lives of First Nations people in Australia.

1 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue Native American Boarding School Stories Welcome to JAIE’s first issue of the 2018 volume year, a special issue on the history and legacies of the boarding and residential schools developed in the United States and Canada to allegedly “civilize” Indigenous peoples. The special issue was developed in concert with the planning for an exhibit, Away From Home: American­ Indian Boarding School Stories, planned to open at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, in early 2019. Inception of the Heard exhibit dates to the late 1990s, with planning for an exhibit titled Remembering Our Indian School Days, which opened in 2000. Originally envisioned as a five-­ year installation, what quickly became known as “the boarding school exhibit” attracted a degree of public interest and engagement by Native and non-­ Native audiences that kept it open year after year. In 2015, Heard staff began to plan an updated, refreshed, and renewed boarding school exhibit. That story is told in the article in this special issue titled “Remembering Our Indian School Days: A Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum.” Before we dive into the stories of boarding schools, it is important to note that this special issue and the Heard exhibits to which it is linked primarily focus on boarding schools and Native communities in the United States. The history and legacies of Canadian residential schools that enrolled First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples are intimately linked with U.S. federal and mission boarding schools, but also have had their own distinctive trajectory. Most notably, Canada in the past few decades has grappled publicly with the serious abuses documented in the residential school system through litigation in the courts, a massive court-­ ordered settlement, and the work of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). More information and an extensive set of reports on the work and findings of the NCTR can be found at http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905. Scholarship in this issue, particularly Jon Reyhner’s overview in “American Indian Boarding Schools: What Went Wrong? What Is Going Right?” includes references to the Canadian context, but an in-­ depth comparison 2 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 of the educational systems and Indigenous experiences in the two settler nations is beyond our scope and demands further attention.1 Native experiences and histories are rooted in place—­ including the places we know as boarding schools. We turn now to discuss the place we—­ the Heard Museum and Arizona State University, home to the Center for Indian Education and the Journal of American Indian Education—­ share in Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun. The City of Phoenix Is a Native Place In the early 20th century, Phoenix was a small southwestern town established in a valley that had been home to Native peoples for millennia . The low desert valley was watered by the Gila and Salt Rivers, which enabled a flourishing agricultural economy for centuries before Spanish , and later U.S. settlers arrived. The ancient peoples known to us today as the Hohokam, or Huhugam, engineered miles of canals crisscrossing the valley floor, irrigating “between 65,000 and 250,000 acres in the Salt River Valley alone” and supporting dozens of villages (Sheridan , 1995, p. 12). Spanish colonial expansion impacted the Native peoples who farmed the valley in the centuries after the Hohokam, but new crops, especially winter wheat and barley, bolstered agricultural and trade opportunities. By the 1840s, Native nations including the Akimel O’odham (also known as Pima) and Pee-­ Posh / Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa) were supplying U.S. military garrisons and settlers with thousands of bushels of wheat every year, and their produce sustained gold rushers flocking to California (DeJong, 2005).2...

Reviewed by: Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation, and: Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South Evan A. Kontarinis (bio) Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation. By Lorri Glover. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 250. Cloth, $50.00.) Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. By Anya Jabour. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 374. Cloth, $39.95.) Historians studying elite young men and women in the early republic South have often fallen victim to employing southern stereotypes in approaching their topics: Men are studied as creatures of honor who live and die by the sword to defend their reputation, while women are presented as one-dimensional southern belles. These studies have provided interesting insights on the meanings of manhood and womanhood in this time period, but they have been criticized for being too restrictive. A new crop of historians is more interested in studying southern men and women on their own terms, as incomplete identities who were always changing, always negotiating and transforming themselves toward a more perfect version of a gendered ideal. Two such historians, Anya Jabour and Lorri Glover, take issue with earlier approaches and make good on taking earlier historians to task by studying manhood and womanhood not as static categories of analysis, but as goals toward which young men and women labored in processes that over time shaped and reshaped the definitions of gender. In Southern Sons, Glover studies the ideal of manhood to which elite young men between the 1790s and the 1820s aspired. Glover finds fault with previous studies that posited honor as the central theme in understanding young southern men. Instead, she argues that honor is merely a single [End Page 760] component of manhood, and that manhood was the culmination of a process that young boys navigated and negotiated in the early republic. Jabour's Scarlett's Sisters traces the lifelong self-fashioning process of womanhood through which coming-of-age women adopted racial, regional, and gender identities. Jabour's "ladies-in-training" rebelled against and resisted society's patriarchal prescriptions and promoted female agency. Both books trace the processes through which elite men and women experienced life stages: youth, adolescence, courtship, adulthood, and the shakeup of the status quo with the coming of the Civil War. While young men and women faced different challenges, both genders exhibited a sense of rebelliousness and questioned authority throughout their journeys of self-definition. Elite families trained their young sons to exhibit an independent nature and a spirit of autonomy. The goal for these youths was to attain what Glover terms "manly independence," a balance between deference to social expectations and an autonomous spirit, and the young men in Southern Sons display that independent spirit extensively. But families who sought to rein in those sons who showed too much independence never ruled these young men with heavy hands. Instead, parents negotiated authority and left good and proper behavior up to their sons. Glover cites many rich examples of parents seeking to coax sons toward good behavior rather than compel them. This type of parenting helped to spur young men toward manhood while nurturing a constant questioning of authority. As a result, we read about young men who exhibited a lifelong negotiation with authority, with society's expectations, with one another, and eventually with the North. Young women on the other hand were expected to embody self-denial, to revel in the pleasing of others, and, in that pleasing, to find personal happiness. But in these expectations for young women, Jabour still finds room for a rebellious nature and individual agency. Young southern women did not display an outward streak of resistance, but in their own way, in what Jabour terms a "safely invisible" manner, they resisted patriarchal notions of womanhood by extending each stage of their lives and avoiding responsibilities they were not ready to face (13). For example, young women who feared the birthing process, and in the early nineteenth century there was much to fear indeed, resisted motherhood and prolonged their single lives. The life stage of engagement allowed women their final opportunity for holding out for true...

Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and public discourse. There are diverse assumptions as to its relation to pidgin, creole and interlanguage varieties, as well as to Australian English. In an attempt to provide some clarification, this paper compares Aboriginal English with the main varieties with which it bears some relationship, either historically (as in the case of the English of Southeast England and Ireland) or geographically (as in the case of Australian English and Australian pidgins and creoles). It does this by employing the morphosyntactic database of the World Atlas of Varieties of English (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer, 2012). The electronic database on morphosyntactic variation in varieties of spoken English (eWAVE) isolates 235 variable features and enables their relative prevalence to be compared across varieties. A comparison of Aboriginal English with six relevant varieties on this database leads to the view that it retains significant influence from the English varieties of Southeast England and of Ireland, in many ways not shared with Australian English and that it has a great deal more feature overlap with Australian creoles than with Australian English, though a significant percentage of its features is shared only with other English varieties rather than creoles. The findings support the view that Aboriginal English is an English variety of post-creole origin, though not a creole, and that it is not directly related to Australian English. In the light of these findings, it is argued that Aboriginal English speakers will be disadvantaged in an education system which assumes that they are speakers of Australian English. In the light of these findings, it is argued that Aboriginal English speakers will be disadvantaged in an education system whichassumes that they are speakers of Australian English.

Young Adults Are Worse Off Than Adolescents

Bridging youth and gender studies to analyse rural young women and men's livelihood pathways in Central Uganda

Introduction: Acoustic analysis of voice is a method for assessing its quality, which has a relatively low cost. It quite simple to use, and is non-invasive. One of the programs of spectral analysis of voice is the program Praat, which allows to explore its acoustic characteristics and analyze the forms, also its allows to edit sound segments and print the spectrogram. The purpose: Investigate the acoustic parameters of the voice Ukrainians of different ages and genders and perform the calculation of reference intervals (RI) for these indicators. Material and methods: We had examined150 healthy Ukrainians aged 18 to 70. The study was performed using a Behringer C1U condenser microphone and Praat software (version 5.1.12.). The following acoustic characteristics of the voice were studied: the fundamental frequency of voice (F0) in Hz, the maximum phonation time (MPT) in seconds, the Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR) in dB, Jitter in%, Shimmer in%. Four groups were formed for the study: 1a – young women (18-44 years); 2a – young men (18-44 years); 1b – middle-aged women (45-59 years); 2b – middle-aged men (45-59 years). Results: Young and middle-aged men showed significantly higher MPT than women of relevant age. The value of MPT in women with age increased slightly, in men decreased slightly. RI for the indicator of MPT, in 1a group is 11,35-31,28 s, in 2a group – 15,55-39,53 s, in 1b group -14,30-33,01 s, and in 2b group –12,59-31,90 s. The value of F0 in young and middle-aged women is statistically higher than in men of the same age group (p <0.001). With age, this figure decreases slightly in women and men. RI for the indicator F0, in 1a group is 107,0-316,5 Hz, in 2a group – 94,1-139,3 Hz, in 1b group – 94,3-339,1 Hz, and in 2b group – 80,3 -174,3Hz.A comparative analysis of the HNR in young and middle-aged men didn’t show significant differences. In middle-aged women this value is significantly higher than in young women. RI for the HNR in group 1a is 14,194-26,946 dB; in group 2a – 17,328-28,675 dB; in group 1b -15,254-26,536 dB, and in group 2b – 13,545-30,368 dB. The Jitter index in men and young women does not differ statistically. This figure increases statistically in men with age, in women this rate the same level. RI for the Jitter in 1a group – 0,110-0,436%; in 2a group – 0,101-0,472%; in 1b group – 0,094-0,520% and in 2b group – 0,117-0,460%. A comparative analysis of Shimmer in men and young women didn't show significant differences, but in middle-aged women this figure decreased statistically compared to young women. In men, this figure has not changed with age. The RI for the Shimmer index is 1,974-14,128% in group 1a; 2,592-12,378% in group 2a; 2,008-6,788% in group 1b; 2,016-12,260% – In group 2b. Conclusions: Indicators of spectral analysis of voice in young and middle-aged women and men are relatively stable and do not change significantly in this time period.