The influences of adult and child speakers in the emergence of Light Warlpiri, an Australian mixed language

Abstract

Many analyses of language change are only able to draw on data from adult speech and therefore cannot empirically motivate a connection between an origin of a potential change and the actuation of that change throughout a community of speakers. The case study of the recent emergence of Light Warlpiri (O’Shannessy 2005), a mixed language spoken in northern Australia, provides new perspectives on the roles of different age groups of adults and children in the emergence of the mixed language, and suggests an empirically motivated model of how a mixed language can emerge from practices of code-switching between languages, in a two-stage process (O’Shannessy 2020). This case also has important implications for the sociohistorical study of the potential role of young learners in other cases of language change and the emergence of new languages.