Light Warlpiri: A New Language

not speakers of Kriol, but elements that could be identified as Kriol (or Aboriginal English) appear in their Warlpiri through borrowing and code-mixing.The codemixing of older Warlpiri speakers both resembles and differs from the combination of elements in LW.A specific difference is that, when code-mixing, older Warlpiri speakers do not produce the LW auxiliary system, which is an innovation on the part of the younger generation.The use of this system, described in Section 4, is taken as diagnostic of LW.LW developed as an in-group language, through Warlpiri speakers speaking to each other and code-mixing between Warlpiri and Kriol or English.It has not undergone processes of pidginization and creolization. 2Nor is LW an interlanguage, because LW did not arise from the need to learn a language other than Warlpiri for communication with a non-Warlpiri speaking group.Nor did LW come from Kriol or English speakers who needed to learn Warlpiri.LW arose among a group of Warlpiri speakers.They typically code-mixed between Warlpiri and Kriol or English, and their code-mixing has conventionalized into a new language, which is now learned by children as one of their two first languages. 3 My analysis of LW is based on approximately 90 hours of audio and video tape recordings of children's and young adults' speech, between 2001 and 2004, including both spontaneous and elicited production data. 4 Organization of PaperIn this paper I describe LW and demonstrate that it is a new language.Lajamanu children learn both LW and Warlpiri.They target LW as the language they produce first and as the language of their everyday interactions.They speak LW with each other and with older adults, even if older adults speak to them in Warlpiri.LW is spoken only with people from Lajamanu community.Both adults and children think of it as a kind of Warlpiri.2 In a sociolinguistic context of extreme social disruption, when members of a newly-emerged community have an urgent need for communication with each other, speakers of several different languages develop a more restricted language, a pidgin, for communication with each other in certain public domains, but speak their respective first languages in their domestic domains.In creolization the pidgin develops and becomes the first language of the next generation, the creole (see, for example, Harris 1991Harris , 1993;;Mulhausler 1991).The debate about the genesis and typology of creoles is not addressed by this paper. 3McConvell et al. (in progress) argue that LW is a Mixed Language.