Language evolution and change in a small-scale multilingual desert community

forthcoming

When languages come into contact, they can undergo periods of rapid and profound change. However, our scientific understanding of how this unfolds is heavily skewed towards a non-representative modern context: global languages (like English) rapidly supplanting or restructuring minority languages. For much of human history however, language change was likely characterized by frequent language contact between generally related languages spoken in small-scale, multilingual communities. It remains unclear whether language change in these largely undocumented contexts mirrors or differs from the better documented, but less representative, cases involving global languages. Critically, our opportunities to document how languages change in such contexts are disappearing due to the damaging effects of colonization and globalization upon the relevant communities. DesertFlux responds to this urgency by capitalizing on the recent uncovering of audio records spanning 40 years of language change among varieties of the Kukatja language, spoken in a multilingual contact situation in the Western Desert region of Australia. In collaboration with the Kukatja community, DesertFlux will examine the evolution of the Kukatja language in this critical sociolinguistic context by targeting a core domain of language structure—argument-encoding bound pronouns—a domain in which we would expect to see a pattern of simplification but one in which preliminary study has revealed variation and even complexification. DesertFlux will innovatively apply sociovariationist techniques, hitherto used on varieties of major languages, to reveal who was changing their speech and when. The results of DesertFlux will not only fill a gap in our understanding of how language change unfolds in a context more representative of human history but will also provide the Kukatja community with the first record of their changing language along with targeted material for supporting ongoing language maintenance efforts.