Greg Dickson and Gautier Durantin from the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) have published an academic article on their research on Kriol and its different dialects. They researched one particular Kriol word called the reflexive, which is like the English word ‘myself‘. They looked at how this word might be spoken differently by Kriol speakers in different communities.

To help them with their analysis they used the collection of Kriol materials found in the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages to find examples of this word in the written form. It helped them to understand how Barunga speakers might have been saying this word and also how different people may have been pronouncing the word differently (i.e. using different ‘variants’ of the word).

Here’s an extract from the paper (p.180):

Dickson, G., & Durantin, G. (2019). Variation in the reflexive in Australian Kriol. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 5(2), 171–207. https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.00005.dic

If you have a story about using materials from the Living Archive in your research, let us know so we can share it with everyone, and add it to our collection at https://livingarchive.cdu.edu.au/academic-references/