Computerised Experimental Methods of Studying Australian Aboriginal English

This paper aims to describe certain phonetical, morphological and lexical features of Australian Aboriginal English that have been detected throughout the analysis of Australian Aboriginal English texts in LingvoDoc and Praat. The study outlines the methods, goals, and benefits of using the linguistic platform LingvoDoc to identify and systematize the grammatical and lexical features of Australian Aboriginal English. Numerous researchers note that Australian Aboriginal English is a distinct ethnolect, differing from the English spoken by Australians of British descent. By using LingvoDoc to create a collection of Australian Aboriginal English dictionaries that describe features specific to particular localities in Australia, it is likely we can draw conclusions about correlations between the lexical and grammatical features of this ethnolect and various extralinguistic factors. The texts under scrutiny include transcripts of interviews with Aboriginal Elders, musicians, teachers and artists, song lyrics, and personal stories. Informants originate in various places across Australia and belong to various age cohorts from adolescence to late adulthood. Texts were grouped based on informants’ places of origin, and a separate dictionary for each of those places was created in Lingvodoc. Each dictionary was attached to a human settlement on the world map, which helped us track the correlation between the speakers’ origin and the grammatical and lexical characteristics of their speech. This method reveals which linguistic patterns may be characteristic of speakers from certain geographical areas, thus unveiling potential correlations. The phonetical part of our study aims to discover differences between vowel formants in Standard Australian and Australian Aboriginal English.

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