Felicity Meakins
Biographic Data
| ID | 566071 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Felicity Meakins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Felicity |
| FAMILY NAME | Meakins |
| SIGNATURE | MEAKINS F |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4487-4351 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 172 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1959 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Sali-CAT: A new method for ranking social salience for multiple variables
Social salience, the association of a social category with linguistic variables, has been hypothesized to be an important driver of language change. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested due to the lack of a reliable measure of social salience. In this paper, we present Salience Categorization Test (Sali-CAT), a new approach to measuring the association of word variants with social categories across multiple lexical variables. The approa…
Acquisition or change in the comprehension of word order and case marking in Gurindji Kriol
Obituary: Jeffrey Alan Siegel 3 November 1945–8 March 2025
Depending on gender: The role of Gurindji women in contact-induced language change
Sociolinguists have grappled with how speakers of different genders use linguistic variables differentially to constitute their identities. Two seemingly-conflicting generalisations have emerged, referred to as the gender paradox. Women at once maintain standard forms which are overtly-discussed and positively-evaluated; yet lead change in non-standard forms which are below the level of consciousness. These trends are relatively robust in cases o…
Quantifying the language dynamics of bilingual communities
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What have we missed: Theorising about Creoles in the absence of Melanesia and Australia
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The third space in the fourth column: Revisiting the role of agency in the formation of Creoles
Intergenerational changes in Gurindji Kriol: Comparing apparent-time and real-time data
This paper explores intergenerational changes in Gurindji Kriol, in order to determine whether differences between adults and children are the result of an abrupt generational shift or an extended acquisition process. We analyse the production of Gurindji in the speech of five age groups of Gurindji Kriol speakers, using a set of 176 picture-prompt narratives from 70 different speakers. The data is analysed both synchronically (in apparent-time) …
Empiricism or imperialism: The science of Creole Exceptionalism
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The word wide web: A mycelial turn in the conceptualisation and modelling of language evolution
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Tradition and innovation: Using sign language in a Gurindji community in Northern Australia
In the Gurindji community of Kalkaringi in Northern Australia the shared practices of everyday communication employed by both hearing and deaf members of the community include conventionalized manual actions from the lexicon of Indigenous sign as well as some recent visual practices derived from contact with both written English and with Auslan. We consider some dimensions of these multimodal practices, including kinship signs and signs for time-…
Holding the mirror up to converted languages: Two grammars, one lexicon
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This article describes an unusual result of language contact occurring in North-Central Australia, where extensive long-term contact between speakers of the genetically unrelated Jingulu and Mudburra has resulted in a high degree of lexical borrowing, with little if any change to syntactic or morphological structure in either language. What is particularly unusual about this borrowing is that it is …
Language change in multidimensional space: New methods for modelling linguistic coherence
Linguistic coherence—the co-variation of language variants within speaker repertoires—has been proposed as a key process driving the divergence of language dialects. Previous studies on coherence have been often limited by dataset sizes and analyses. We analyze the use of 185 variables across 78 speakers from the Gurindji community in Australia. We use two multivariate statistical approaches to test whether clusters of variables co-vary with gene…
Puranguwana’ (‘Perishing in the Sun’) as sung by Patrick Jupiter Smith, Jack Gordon and Marie Gordon
Across Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal songs are often attributed to the spirit world rather than as compositions by the living. Deceased ancestors give songs to people and such a recipient is described as the finder of a song. This is particularly evident in 'Puranguwana' ('Perishing in the Sun'), a song of the public ceremonial genre known by older men and women at Balgo and Bililuna communities in the south-east Kimberley in Western Australia…
Lend me your verbs: Verb borrowing between Jingulu and Mudburra
We discuss two unrelated languages, Jingulu (Mirndi, non-Pama-Nyungan) and Mudburra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan), which have been in contact for 200–500 years. The language contact situation is unusual cross-linguistically due to the high number of shared nouns, tending to an almost shared noun lexicon. Even more unusually, this lexicon was formed by borrowing in both directions at a relatively equal rate. The aim of this paper is to extend the b…
Which MATter matters in PATtern borrowing? The direction of case syncretisms
Gender Lender: Noun Borrowings between Jingulu and Mudburra in Northern Australia
This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously examine the behaviour of gender where (…
Birth of a contact language did not favor simplification: Supplemental Material
Birth of a contact language did not favor simplification
We report on the rapid birth of a new language in Australia, Gurindji Kriol, from the admixture of Gurindji and Kriol. This study is the first investigation of contact-induced change within a single speaker population that uses multiple variants. It also represents an innovative modification of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model to investigate temporal change in linguistic data. We track changes in lexicon and grammar over three generati…
The Development of Phonological Stratification: Evidence from Stop Voicing Perception in Gurindji Kriol and Roper Kriol
This study tests the effect of multilingualism and language contact on consonant perception. Here, we explore the emergence of phonological stratification using two alternative forced-choice (2 afc ) identification task experiments to test listener perception of stop voicing with contrasting minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. We examine a unique language ecology consisting of three languages spoken in Northern Territory, Australia:…
Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages since Colonisation
Australian language contact in historical and synchronic perspective
This volume is the first collection of research dedicated to the effects of recent language contact processes on Australian languages
Deadly Reckoning: Changes in Gurindji Children’s Knowledge of Cardinals
Dramatic language change has been underway among Gurindji people since European colonization. One major shift has occurred in the use of cardinal directions (N–S–E–W) to express spatial relations. Where older Gurindji adults use 28 inflected forms for each cardinal to describe large and small-scale space, young adults use four forms and only for large-scale space. This paper examines Gurindji children’s knowledge of cardinals to determine whether…
Bilingualism, language shift and the corresponding expansion of spatial cognitive systems
Language Contact Varieties
Since colonisation, the language ecology of Australia has shifted dramatically to accommodate English. Although a number of Aboriginal languages continue to be spoken, many have all but disappeared with only vestiges remaining in the notebooks of early enthusiasts and in the few words still maintained in the speech of some Aboriginal communities. Other Aboriginal languages have been maintained but have undergone restructuring under the influence …
Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages
Borrowing contextual inflection: Evidence from northern Australia
Gurindji Kriol: A Mixed Language Emerges from Code-switching
1. IntroductionBakker (2003: 129) claims that ‘mixed languages’ do not arise from code-switching.The language spoken most frequently by Gurindji people between the ages of 3 andabout 45, termed ‘Gurindji Kriol’ here, is a counter-example to this generalization.This language is made up of elements of Kriol, an English based creole spoken acrossthe middle of the Northern Territory of Australia; and Gurindji, the traditionallanguage of a group in th…
Case-Marking in Contact: The development and function of case morphology in Gurindji Kriol
Until recently, mixed languages were considered an oddity of contact linguistics, with debates about whether or not they actually existed stifling much descriptive work or discussion of their origins. These debates have shifted from questioning their existence to a focus on their formation, and their social and structural features. This book aims to advance our understanding of how mixed languages evolve by introducing a substantial corpus from a…
Spaced Out: Intergenerational Changes in the Expression of Spatial Relations by Gurindji People
Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people at Kalkaringi in northern Australia. It has retained many of the features of Gurindji including case-marking, many other nominal suffixes (inflectional and derivational) and significant portions of vocabulary (including nouns and coverbs). It has also lost many features of Gurindji including inflecting verbs and bound pronouns. Other systems have also been significantly affected by lang…
Variation in Voice Onset Time in Stops in Gurindji Kriol: Picture Naming and Conversational Speech
Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in the traditionally Gurindji-speaking communities of northern Australia. Nearly all words in Gurindji Kriol are derived from Gurindji or from Kriol, both of which have been described as lacking a stop voicing contrast, at least in basilectal varieties in the case of Kriol. In this study, we describe variation in voice onset time in Gurindji Kriol, in both pict…
Comparing Vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: Citation Speech Data
Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words…
Birth of a contact language did not favor simplification
We report on the rapid birth of a new language in Australia, Gurindji Kriol, from the admixture of Gurindji and Kriol. This study is the first investigation of contact-induced change within a single speaker population that uses multiple variants. It also represents an innovative modification of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model to investigate temporal change in linguistic data. We track changes in lexicon and grammar over three generati…
Tradition and innovation: Using sign language in a Gurindji community in Northern Australia
In the Gurindji community of Kalkaringi in Northern Australia the shared practices of everyday communication employed by both hearing and deaf members of the community include conventionalized manual actions from the lexicon of Indigenous sign as well as some recent visual practices derived from contact with both written English and with Auslan. We consider some dimensions of these multimodal practices, including kinship signs and signs for time-…
The Development of Phonological Stratification: Evidence from Stop Voicing Perception in Gurindji Kriol and Roper Kriol
This study tests the effect of multilingualism and language contact on consonant perception. Here, we explore the emergence of phonological stratification using two alternative forced-choice (2 afc ) identification task experiments to test listener perception of stop voicing with contrasting minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. We examine a unique language ecology consisting of three languages spoken in Northern Territory, Australia:…
Deadly Reckoning: Changes in Gurindji Children’s Knowledge of Cardinals
Dramatic language change has been underway among Gurindji people since European colonization. One major shift has occurred in the use of cardinal directions (N–S–E–W) to express spatial relations. Where older Gurindji adults use 28 inflected forms for each cardinal to describe large and small-scale space, young adults use four forms and only for large-scale space. This paper examines Gurindji children’s knowledge of cardinals to determine whether…
Bilingualism, language shift and the corresponding expansion of spatial cognitive systems
Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languages1,2
Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri are two mixed languages spoken in northern Australia by Gurindji and Warlpiri people, respectively. Both languages are the outcome of the fusion of a contact variety of English (Kriol/Aboriginal English) with a traditional Australian Aboriginal language (Gurindji or Warlpiri). The end result is two languages which show remarkable structural similarity. In both mixed languages, pronouns, TMA auxiliaries and word o…
Learning Vowel Categories From Maternal Speech in Gurindji Kriol
Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech …
Which MATter matters in PATtern borrowing? The direction of case syncretisms
Gender Lender: Noun Borrowings between Jingulu and Mudburra in Northern Australia
This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously examine the behaviour of gender where (…
How much input is enough? Correlating comprehension and child language input in an endangered language
In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for the activation of speech to occur in later life. In many areas of Australia, input to children of tr…
Radiation Hazards of Diagnostic X Rays
This thesis is an investigation of case morphology in a mixed language, Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people in northern Australia. It fuses Gurindji, which is a member of the Ngumpin-Yapa subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan family, with Kriol, which is an English-lexifier creole spoken across the north of Australia. Gurindji Kriol exhibits a structural split between the NP and VP systems, but is lexically quite mixed. Kriol p…
Gurindji Kriol: A Mixed Language Emerges from Code-switching
1. IntroductionBakker (2003: 129) claims that ‘mixed languages’ do not arise from code-switching.The language spoken most frequently by Gurindji people between the ages of 3 andabout 45, termed ‘Gurindji Kriol’ here, is a counter-example to this generalization.This language is made up of elements of Kriol, an English based creole spoken acrossthe middle of the Northern Territory of Australia; and Gurindji, the traditionallanguage of a group in th…
Land, language and identity: The socio-political origins of Gurindji Kriol
Empirical evidence for the sociolinguistic origins of mixed languages has often proven elusive due to the paucity of historical material on the linguistic and political situation at the point of their genesis. Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people in northern Australia. The socio-historical circumstances of its emergence are well-documented due to the role that Gurindji people played in Australian politics at the time. Betw…
Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages
Chapter 2. The socio-political origins and setting of Gurindji Kriol
Comparing Vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: Citation Speech Data
Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in traditionally Gurindji speaking communities of northern Australia. For phonetics and phonology, a significant aspect of the mixed language status of Gurindji Kriol is that, in running speech, approximately two-thirds of word tokens are Kriol-derived, and one-third are Gurindji-derived. In this study, we describe vowel pronunciation in the Kriol-derived words…
Spaced Out: Intergenerational Changes in the Expression of Spatial Relations by Gurindji People
Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken by Gurindji people at Kalkaringi in northern Australia. It has retained many of the features of Gurindji including case-marking, many other nominal suffixes (inflectional and derivational) and significant portions of vocabulary (including nouns and coverbs). It has also lost many features of Gurindji including inflecting verbs and bound pronouns. Other systems have also been significantly affected by lang…
Case-Marking in Contact: The development and function of case morphology in Gurindji Kriol
Until recently, mixed languages were considered an oddity of contact linguistics, with debates about whether or not they actually existed stifling much descriptive work or discussion of their origins. These debates have shifted from questioning their existence to a focus on their formation, and their social and structural features. This book aims to advance our understanding of how mixed languages evolve by introducing a substantial corpus from a…
Borrowing contextual inflection: Evidence from northern Australia
Which Mix — code-switching or a mixed language? — Gurindji Kriol
Gurindji Kriol is a contact variety spoken in northern Australia which has been identified as a mixed language. Yet its status as an autonomous language system must be questioned for three reasons — (i) it continues to be spoken alongside its source languages, Gurindji and Kriol, (ii) it has a close diachronic and synchronic relationship to code-switching between Gurindji and Kriol, and (iii) its structure bears a strong resemblance to patterns f…
Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languages1,2
Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri are two mixed languages spoken in northern Australia by Gurindji and Warlpiri people, respectively. Both languages are the outcome of the fusion of a contact variety of English (Kriol/Aboriginal English) with a traditional Australian Aboriginal language (Gurindji or Warlpiri). The end result is two languages which show remarkable structural similarity. In both mixed languages, pronouns, TMA auxiliaries and word o…
Learning Vowel Categories From Maternal Speech in Gurindji Kriol
Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech …
A Grammar of Bilinarra: An Australian Aboriginal Language of the Northern Territory
Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materia…
Variation in Voice Onset Time in Stops in Gurindji Kriol: Picture Naming and Conversational Speech
Gurindji Kriol is the home language of children and adults under about 40 years of age in the traditionally Gurindji-speaking communities of northern Australia. Nearly all words in Gurindji Kriol are derived from Gurindji or from Kriol, both of which have been described as lacking a stop voicing contrast, at least in basilectal varieties in the case of Kriol. In this study, we describe variation in voice onset time in Gurindji Kriol, in both pict…
How much input is enough? Correlating comprehension and child language input in an endangered language
In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for the activation of speech to occur in later life. In many areas of Australia, input to children of tr…
A Grammar of Bilinarra: An Australian Aboriginal Language of the Northern Territory
This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materials on which this grammatical description is based were collected by the authors over a 20 year period from the last first-language speakers of the language, most of whom…
Language Contact Varieties
Since colonisation, the language ecology of Australia has shifted dramatically to accommodate English. Although a number of Aboriginal languages continue to be spoken, many have all but disappeared with only vestiges remaining in the notebooks of early enthusiasts and in the few words still maintained in the speech of some Aboriginal communities. Other Aboriginal languages have been maintained but have undergone restructuring under the influence …
Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages since Colonisation
Australian language contact in historical and synchronic perspective
This volume is the first collection of research dedicated to the effects of recent language contact processes on Australian languages
Deadly Reckoning: Changes in Gurindji Children’s Knowledge of Cardinals
Dramatic language change has been underway among Gurindji people since European colonization. One major shift has occurred in the use of cardinal directions (N–S–E–W) to express spatial relations. Where older Gurindji adults use 28 inflected forms for each cardinal to describe large and small-scale space, young adults use four forms and only for large-scale space. This paper examines Gurindji children’s knowledge of cardinals to determine whether…
Bilingualism, language shift and the corresponding expansion of spatial cognitive systems
The Development of Phonological Stratification: Evidence from Stop Voicing Perception in Gurindji Kriol and Roper Kriol
This study tests the effect of multilingualism and language contact on consonant perception. Here, we explore the emergence of phonological stratification using two alternative forced-choice (2 afc ) identification task experiments to test listener perception of stop voicing with contrasting minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. We examine a unique language ecology consisting of three languages spoken in Northern Territory, Australia:…
Gender Lender: Noun Borrowings between Jingulu and Mudburra in Northern Australia
This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously examine the behaviour of gender where (…
Birth of a contact language did not favor simplification: Supplemental Material
Birth of a contact language did not favor simplification
We report on the rapid birth of a new language in Australia, Gurindji Kriol, from the admixture of Gurindji and Kriol. This study is the first investigation of contact-induced change within a single speaker population that uses multiple variants. It also represents an innovative modification of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model to investigate temporal change in linguistic data. We track changes in lexicon and grammar over three generati…
Linguistics (31 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Australian Indigenous Culture and History (11 works) · Language and cultural evolution (10 works) · Language contact (10 works)