| Also Known As: Roper-bamyili Creole
Description:
Kriol is an Australian creole language that developed out of the contact between European settlers and the indigenous people in the northern regions of Australia, presently spoken by about 30,000 people. Despite the language's similarities to English in vocabulary, it has a distinct syntactic structure and grammar, and is, therefore, a language in its own right.
European settlement in the Northern Territory was attempted over a period of about forty years. Settlement finally succeeded in 1870, and an influx of both English and Chinese speakers followed. In order to communicate between these two groups and the local Aboriginal people, pidgins developed throughout the territory. By 1900, Northern Territory Pidgin English (NTPE) was widespread and well understood. (pidgin English means nobody speaks it as their first language, for a pidgin to become a language it must have roots as a first language)
For NTPE to creolise (to move beyond being a convenient pidgin and become a fully independent language), a new community would have to develop where it would become the primary language for all speakers. This first occurred in the Roper River Mission (Ngukurr), where cattle stations were..... full article at Wikipedia |
