Author Description

In recent years pidgin languages have begun to lose the tag that has dogged them in the past of being bastard or corrupt languages. Arising mainly as reduced languages for intercultural communication in contexts ranging from trade to outright colonisation, they have often been viewed by their users as inferior to the ‘full’ or ‘pure’ languages of their respective cultures. As one writer put it in 1939: ‘In whatever country we find Pidgin English it is still an inferior growth, or development from originally pure words or sentences of some language or other’. These days pidgins are increasingly recognised for the insights they provide into the dynamic processes of intercultural communication and the nature of human communication in general. They are particularly useful for tracing the ways languages change and develop in response to changing sociohistorical circumstances. By compiling a dictionary of one such language, South Australian Pidgin English, spoken primarily between Aborigines and Europeans in South Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, we hope to continue this trend, as well as to provide an invaluable resource for those engaging with historical and literary texts that in the past have often proved difficult to those not trained in pidgin linguistics. The dictionary is also intended for contemporary speakers of Nunga English – a variety of Aboriginal English spoken in the Adelaide metropolitan and neighbouring country regions – who are interested in the historical origins of some of the forms they currently use in their day-to-day communication.