A methodological approach on the study of Aboriginal language loanwords in contemporary standard Australian English : creating an extensive corpus

International audienceStandard Australian English (SAusE) is characterized by the presence of indigenous vocabulary coming from Indigenous Languages of Australia (hereafter ILA). The need for a specific vocabulary to name the endemic fauna and flora unknown in Europe has been the occasion for borrowings since 1788.The present paper is based on a dictionary study of these borrowings on three reference works: Dixon et al. 2006, the Macquarie Dictionary 2009 and the Macquarie Dictionary Online. We set out to compare the pronunciations of the words borrowed from ILA with that of the lexicon present in SAusE to see how their lexical stress pattern, consonants and vowels were maintained or influenced by SAusE. Putting together a corpus containing as many of these borrowings as possible including extensive linguistic descriptions proved to be a challenge, particularly in the source languages at stake, and the methodology employed will be the focus of this paper. Several questions arose: Which ILA do the loanwords come from? When were they borrowed? How are these languages described? To what extent does this impact the constitution of the corpus? Few works exist on the subject though in recent years, the Australian government has increasingly given importance to these previously ignored populations. The 2000’s saw the emergence of documented books, lexicons and dictionaries about Aboriginal languages (Dixon 2002, Thieberger and McGregor 2019, Thieberger and McGregor 2020). Given the small number of speakers of these languages and in spite of the remarkable work done to revitalize ILA, some of these languages are globally little described. Still, for each item we sought to collect additional linguistic data in SAusE and in ILA. We will present both qualitative and quantitative data concerning the constitution of this corpus and will also give a detailed account of what we have planned to fill in certain gaps