Outta country: The Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English

The Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (BAE) comprises over 42 h of audio-recorded conversation among First Nations youth living outta country at St Mary’s Hills, a boarding school in Whadjuk Nyungar Country, in the South of Western Australia. Collected as part of a sociolinguistic ethnographic study at the boarding school, the BAE features 35 young women and five young men, aged 12–17. Due to varying enrolments and cultural protocols in the community, 31 young women were followed ethnographically. All boarders hail from across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. While some are monolingual speakers of Aboriginal English, others also speak traditional languages and/or Kriol. The BAE features casual and unstructured conversations among peers and with the non-First Nations participant-observer researcher in English. As the first spoken corpus of First Nations boarders, this dataset has contributed to our understanding of the linguistic experiences of First Nations communities in mainstream institutions, and the role language plays in the construction of boarders’ sociolinguistic identities as they navigate the educational system away from home. It has allowed for the exploration of boarders’ variable use of phonetic and morpho-syntactic features and the social meanings underpinning linguistic variation.