Linguists have documented what they believe is a new language quietly developing in Lajamana, a remote village in Australia’s Northern Territory populated mostly by Warlpiri.

Known as Light Warlpiri or Warlpiri Rampaku, it is a hybrid language created by mixing various elements of Standard Australian English with Warlpiri, an Aboriginal language spoken by several thousand indigenous people in northern Australia, and Kriol, an English Creole language developed in the late 19th century. /20. early century.

This cultural curiosity has been explored in depth by Carmel O’Shannessy, professor of linguistics at the Australian National University, who first reported the “new language” in 2005.

He believes this arose in the 1970s and 1980s, when some Warlpiri adults began occasionally using English or Creole words in the middle of Warlpiri sentences. This is known as code-switching, essentially when a native English speaker switches between two or more languages ​​while speaking. When children heard these complex sentences, they processed them as a single language and improved from there.

“For a mixed language to develop, you need bilingual or multilingual people who code-switch frequently, in a very systematic way, who are bilingual or multilingual and have some social reason to create their own way of speaking,” O’Shannessy told Atlas. .” The uncertainty of 2018.

“Code switching does not usually produce this result, it is quite rare,” he explained.

Over the years, the language system continued to evolve naturally and even became the native language of some people in Lajaman. Even traditional Warlpiri is considered “endangered” and spoken by only 4,000 people, but Light Warlpiri is even more obscure, spoken and understood by around 350 people, most of whom are under the age of 40.

Lajamanu is incredibly remote. The nearest community is Daguragu, about 110 kilometers (68 mi) away, and the nearest town of significant size is Katherine, more than 560 kilometers (350 mi) away, about a 6-hour drive. Most of this journey is spent on “unreinforced” dirt roads in poor condition. This intense isolation partly gave rise to the Light Warlpiri, similar to how some of the most unique animals evolved on isolated islands.

It’s not just odd words and phrases that are excluded and borrowed. As O’Shannessy explains, the basic structure of the language is influenced by various elements of Warlpiri, English and Creole languages.

In most languages ​​it is rare to hear the structures of the verb system and noun system from different, distant languages. However, in Light Warlpiri the verbs come mostly from English or Creole, while most of the other grammatical components in the sentence are from Warlpiri.

“Overall, the structure of Light Warlpiri is a mixed language structure, with most verbs and some verbal morphologies drawn from English and/or Creole, and most nominal morphologies drawn from Warlpiri. The names are drawn from both the Warlpiri lexicon and English word sources,” Light wrote in a 2013 article about the Warlpiri.

“The restructuring of the support system selectively draws on elements of Warlpiri and various varieties and styles of English and/or Creole to produce new structures,” O’Shaughnessy added.

If you want to hear what it’s like, you can listen to the clip above of a young girl telling a story about a monster in Light Warlpiri.