Cirrus@Austlit

'From the first encounters with outsiders, Indigenous Australians developed words for expressing the new things, animals and concepts that came with the outsiders. This paper shows how the distribution of a single loanword ‘work’ and its variants across Australia sheds light on early contact between outsiders and Indigenous Australians, as well as between Indigenous Australians themselves. I propose that widespread multilingualism has led to diffusion both of forms and of strategies for integrating them morphologically into the grammars of individual languages. The geographical distribution of a surprising pronunciation of ‘work’ involving a flap or trill and possibly a final /m/ suggests diffusion areas of borrowing from neighbouring languages and chain borrowing, rather than separate independent borrowings from English. Diffusion through traditional Indigenous languages, rather than through a contact language, provides a partial explanation for the surprising absence of particular variants in the English-lexifier contact languages that developed in Australia.'  (Introduction)