Australian Aboriginal English (AAE or AbE) is a cover term used for the complex, rule-governed varieties of English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) population as a result of colonisation. It is made up of a number of varieties which developed differently in different parts of Australia, and grammar and pronunciation differs from that of standard Australian English, along a continuum. Some of its words have also been adopted into standard or colloquial Australian English.
General description
There are generally distinctive features of phonology, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use in Australian Aboriginal English, compared with Australian English. The language is also often accompanied by a lot of non-verbal cues.
There exists a continuum of varieties of Aboriginal English, ranging from light forms, close to standard Australian English, to heavy forms, closer to Kriol. The varieties developed differently in different parts of Australia, by Aboriginal peoples of many language groups. Kriol is a totally separate language from English, spoken by over 30,000 people in Australia.
Negative attitudes that exist in Australian society towards AbE have negative effects on Aboriginal people across law, health and educational contexts. Speakers have been noted to tend to change between different forms of AAE depending on whom they are speaking to, e.g. striving to speak more like Australian English when speaking to a non-Indigenous English-speaking person. This is sometimes referred to as diglossia or codeswitching and is common among Aboriginal people living in major cities.
AAE terms, or derivative terms, are sometimes used by the broader Australian community. Australian Aboriginal English is spoken among Aboriginal people generally, but is especially evident in what are called "discrete communities", i.e. ex-government or mission reserves such as the DOGIT communities in Queensland. Because most Aboriginal Australians live in urban and rural areas with strong social interaction across assumed rural and urban and remote divides, many urban people also use Aboriginal English.
Specific features of Aboriginal English differ between regions. In Nyungar country in Perth, Western Australia, they include address terms and kinship, uninverted questions (That's your Auntie?), the utterance tag unna, and Nyungar terms such as boya, boodjar, maya-maya and moorditji, among other features. Specific terms can be used to refer to local or regional varieties of AbE, for example Koori or Murri English, Broome lingo and Noongar English.
Aboriginal English varieties also occur in Indigenous-authored fictional broadcast media, including kinship words like cousin brother, brother boys, sister girl and daughter girl, and other frequent words such as blackfella(s) and mob.
Grammar
Auxiliary verbs
Aboriginal English does not make use of auxiliary verbs, such as to be and to have, or copulas to link things together. For example, the Aboriginal English equivalent of "We are working" would be "We workin'". Linguists do not regard this as "just dropping words out", but as a fundamental change to the way in which English is constructed.
Pronouns
In Aboriginal English, particularly in northern Australia, the pronouns he and him may be used for females and inanimate objects in additional to the expected masculine case. This is also shared in standard English with the masculine pronouns possessing a neuter case, uncommonly (often historically) referring to an unspecified sex (e.g. one must brush his teeth). The distinction between he as the nominative form and him as the oblique form is not always observed, and him may be found as the subject of a verb.
Phonology
Sutton (1989) documents that some speakers of Aboriginal English in the area around Adelaide in South Australia have an uncommon degree of rhoticity, relative to both other AAE speakers and Standard Australian English speakers (which are generally non-rhotic). These speakers realise /r/ as [ɹ] in the preconsonantal postvocalic position – after a vowel but before another a consonant – within stems. For example: [boːɹd] "board", [t̠ʃɜɹt̠ʃ] "church", [pɜɹθ] "Perth"; but [flæː] "flour", [dɒktə] "doctor". Sutton speculates that this feature may derive from the fact that many of the first settlers in coastal South Australia – including Cornish tin-miners, Scottish missionaries, and American whalers – spoke rhotic varieties. Many of his informants grew up in Point Pearce and Point McLeay.