CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL WORDS IN DICTIONARIES— A HISTORY

R. M. W. Dixon

1. Introduction

Over 400 words have been borrowed from the Aboriginal languages of into , some into other varieties of English and thence into other languages. A chronological account is provided of how English dictionaries have dealt with the commonest loans— kangaroo, boomerang, koala, dingo, wombat and a few more. There is comparison with the way in which loans from American and African languages were treated. Although there were c 250 distinct indigenous languages in Australia, words taken from them were marked just as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘native Australian’ until the publication of the second edition of the unabridged Random House Dictionary in 1987, of The Australian National Dictionary in 1988 and of Australian Words in English, their Origin and Meaning in 1990.1 The final question is: after full etymologies were provided, in 1987–1990, how did dictionaries handle this new information. In summary, until the late 1980s dictionaries across the world paid scant attention to providing etymologies for words borrowed from the Aboriginal languages of Australia. There was a good deal of reliable primary source material available, but little use was made of it. This lack of attention was due in part to racist denigration of Aboriginal people, their cultures and languages. My own long-term research has involved gathering together extensive primary source materials (both published and unpublished) on each of the c 250 distinct languages

1 Abbreviations used in this chapter are: AAWE, Australian Aboriginal Words in English; ACD, American College dictionary; AND, Australian National Dictionary; COD, Concise Oxford dictionary; DAE, Dictionary of American English; EWD, Ency- clopedic World Dictionary; OED, Oxford English Dictionary; OUP, Oxford Univer- sity Press; SOED, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 530 r. m. w. dixon which were spoken at the time of European invasion (which com- menced in 1788). These materials provided the basis for establishing which language each loan word came from, and its original form and meaning in the source language. For some now-extinct languages all we have is a handful of word lists from the nineteenth century. By comparing variant spellings of a single word (and knowing something of the linguistic profiles of the transcribers) it is possible to reconsti- tute—with a fair degree of confidence—the original phonetic form of the word. Reliable etymological information was published in the late 1980s and has been copied correctly in a number of modern dictionaries. But other dictionaries have exhibited a careless and unscholarly atti- tude, making errors or omissions in the information they now purvey. The author has been the main person responsible for the production of reliable etymological information. He expresses the hope that this information will in the future be treated with respect and reproduced fully and accurately.

About 430 words in common usage in varieties of English are loans from the Aboriginal languages of Australia. They include jarrah (from Nyungar, spoken around Perth, ) for the tree Euca- lyptus marginata, whose hard reddish-brown timber is much prized for furniture-making, yabby (from Wemba-wemba, in western Vic- toria) for freshwater crayfish of the genus Cherax, and brolga (from Kamilaroi, in eastern ) for the tall, graceful crane Grus rubicundus. About sixty of the loans come from Dharuk, the language spoken around Sydney, and another sixty from Nyungar, at Perth. In all around seventy-five languages have supplied loans into English (of the 250 or so distinct languages spoken in Australia at the time of the invasion by Europeans in 1788). For almost 200 years after the first colonisation of Australia, no dic- tionary of English gave the language from which any of these loans were taken, let alone its original form and meaning in that language. Entries for words from Australian languages were just noted as ‘Aus- tralian Aboriginal’ or ‘native Australian’. This is rather like lumping together all loans into English from French, German, Spanish, Turk- ish, Hungarian, Russian, Greek etc., as ‘European’. Then, in 1987, the second edition of the unabridged Random House Dictionary published etymologies for about a hundred items.