Abstract
Abstract This chapter provides an overview of sociolinguistic variation in Australian Indigenous languages, illustrated with examples from Western Desert and Yolngu dialect groups, and from Murrinhpatha. Australian Indigenous society is characterized by geographic and social mobility, which complicates the notions of ‘speech community’ and ‘dialect’. Before colonization, sociolinguistic indexicality appears to have focused on clan, kinship, and geography. These indexicalities have been reconfigured by colonization and town settlement, with the distinction between generations now at least as salient as that between clan lines. This chapter also highlights some linguistic features of Australian sociolinguistic variation, such as socially indexed demonstratives, morphology, and word-initial lenition.
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