Harkins, Jean --- "Book Review - Bridging Two Worlds: Aboriginal English and Crosscultural Understanding" [1994] AboriginalLawB 43; (1994) 3(69) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 12

• Book Review-Bridging Two Worlds: Aboriginal English And Crosscultural Understanding

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Book Review -

Bridging Two Worlds: Aboriginal English and Crosscultural Understanding

Jean Harkins

UQP, 1994

228pp

Reviewed by Jonathan Morrow

Perhaps the greatest impediment that plagues crosscultural communication between speakers of 'standard' English and speakers of Aboriginal English is, curiously, not mistrust, timidity, or the simple inability of each group to make any sense of the other's dialect; rather, the problem lies in the fact that non-Aboriginal speakers of English are usually confident that they understand Aboriginal English. Surely it is easy enough to see that when an Aboriginal speaker uses the word gotta they mean have got to?

Teacher and linguist Jean Harkins refers to this assumption as the 'pseudo-intelligibility trap', a byproduct of traditional European ways of approaching colonial dialects. Attention is focused on the superficial non-standard features of Aboriginal English, and deeper grammatical and semantic differences are elided. Gotta, in fact, does not mean have got to; instead it approximates the non-Aboriginal are going to. But if a non-Aboriginal speaker behaves as if they understand the meaning of gotta (and assumes the existence, perhaps, of an implied obligation) then the Aboriginal speaker may quite reasonably proceed to assume that this person understands more Aboriginal English than they actually do. The consequences of this compounded pseudo-understanding can be serious.

Indeed, the pseudo-intelligibility trap is a trap which non-Aboriginal culture has stupidly sprung for itself by way of 'deficit' theories of English dialects. The methodology of deficit theories, established by people like Bernstein in the 1960s and M A K Halliday in the 1970s, is to take an inadequately described notion of 'standard English' as a linguistic touchstone, and then to proceed to examine a particular dialect - regional, racial, social - to see if it measures up. If there are particular nuances or grammatical constructions of standard English which are not obviously capable of expression in the dialect, then the dialect is relegated to an 'inferior' status, and any patterned linguistic difference is seen as accidental deviance (a negative, reductionist approach which is to some extent already predetermined by the formulation of the category 'non-standard'). Any 'omission' in Aboriginal language is seen as evidence of a lack of the underlying concept – Harkins points to the ridiculous case of linguists who thought that Aboriginal children who did not grammatically acknowledge gender may actually lack a concept of gender. Subtleties of meaning that the dialect has generated itself, within its own structure, are ignored - hence the trap.

It is a deeply chauvinistic and profoundly unilluminating theory of language difference which, unfortunately, has been applied to the study of Aboriginal languages right up to the present day. At a political level, of course, deficit theory comfortably allows non-Aboriginal people to blame Aborigines for their lack of access to white education and for their unwillingness to assimilate. It is sad that Harkins sees the necessity of stating what should already be clear. "[Aboriginal] camps are anything but a linguistically impoverished environment for children. The linguistic environment is, if anything, so rich as to be confusing." (p29)

But Harkins' book goes a long way towards dispatching deficit theories for good. Her study, carried out from 1984 to 1986, is based on the language of Aborigines in the twenty-eight town camps of Alice Springs, a rich multilingual environment in which English is spoken alongside Arrernte and Luritja. One of the most interesting chapters in Harkins' book explores the complex interrelation of factors which govern the choice of which language to use - for example, for a young Aboriginal man to use'flash' town English to older men would be disrespectful; or would be inappropriate when he is talking, for example, about Aboriginal customs.

Harkins goes on to present a sustained, detailed, but lively survey of nouns, verbs, and narrative elements in Aboriginal English. Examining the seemingly inconsistent use of the plural -s, Harkins cannot help indulging in the game of odious linguistic comparisons, but turns the game on its head - for instance she points out, dryly, that Aboriginal English, like Arremte and Luritja, has grammatical categoriess of dual number, unspecified number, and semantic indeterminacy - all of which 'standard' English lacks. She hints at Aboriginal economy of expression, pointing out that articles (a, the) are dropped only when they are unnecessary, and that ellipsis occurs when there is shared background knowledge between speakers.

Perhaps of most interest to a lawyer is the discussion of language which deals with future events. Modal auxiliaries (must, should, can, may, might, etc) are subtly recast in Aboriginal English, so that gotta, for example, may indicate nothing more than future time reference, with no implied obligation. Harkins notes that "a child who approaches the teacher saying 'you gotta give me paper?’ may be misunderstood by the teacher and considered to be issuing a command rather than asking a question with a future tense verb form." .(p89) Similarly, when an Aboriginal speaker says I will go into town, this will indicate an intention to do so at the time of speaking, but will probably not constitute an undertaking that considerable efforts to do so will be carried out. Can't say is often used by Aboriginal people as a disclaimer, not of knowledge, but of authority to speak about something. And so on. Give me money, for an Aboriginal speaker, carries no implication of coercive force. Harkins, aware that her speculation may be based on cultural stereotypes, nevertheless suggests that Aboriginal modal auxiliaries reflect an assumption about the inherent unreliability of the future, and she is willing to concede that Aboriginal English, whilst containing expressions which signify interpersonal obligation, nevertheless lacks structures which allow for the unambiguous prediction of future human action, If an Aboriginal speaker says, "I will do X", this should be understood to mean that there is an intention at the time of speaking to do X, but that other factors may intervene. But, in an uncertain world, we may ask, what use are these modals anyway?

It is clear that these deep-seated grammatical differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal English - especially in discussions of future events - could have legal ramifications, although Harkins is happy to leave these problems up to people like Diana Eades (who wrote Aboriginal English and the Law, see AboriginalLB 59/13). It is interesting to note that Harkins is not so willing as Eades to hypothesize that Aboriginal modal auxiliaries are evidence of a lack of hierarchy in Aboriginal society. Indeed, in formulating a semantic rather than cultural approach to Aboriginal English, Harkins suggests that often the causes of cross-cultural misunderstanding can be very simple. She points to specific instances - for example kill, like its Arrernte and Luritja counterparts, happens to be used by Aboriginal speakers for any forcible impact on a person, animal or thing, whether or not death results. Always means 'frequently', 'repeatedly', not 'at all times'. These sites of potential misunderstanding seem to have little to do with the relative levels of hierarchisation in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies.

However, Harkins really gets down to business when taking on the deficit theorists over the issue of textual cohesion or 'connecting ideas in speech'. Even in the last few years linguists have, somehow, found a lack of "logical connective strategies" (pl08) in Aboriginal English, a discovery which supports theories on the mental inferiority of non-European racial groups, and as such is at basic level indistinguishable from white supremacism and eugenic theories. Jean Harkins presents an informative synopsis of the development of deficit theory in this area, methodically showing the flaws in all of the theory's manifestations. She then examines several brief Aboriginal conversational narratives, carefully showing that the absence of also, however and then (for example), in no way indicates a lack of syntactic complexity. Lexical signals such as because are often implied by Aboriginal speakers, reflecting what Harkins somewhat surprisingly sees as an Aboriginal world view that stresses "the autonomy of the individual" (p127), although non-Aboriginal spoken English, as Harkins points out, also frequently omits causal links. Reasons for human actions, in the Aboriginal lexicon, resist scrutiny, and are "given over long periods of time, in successive interactions on different occasions"; but it is clearly absurd to argue, as Harkin's predecessors did, that Aboriginal children are mentally deficient and are unable to comprehend human causation. She concludes:

Research that focusses only on behavioural differences between a dominant and an oppressed group lends itself, lays itself open, to reinterpretation by the dominant group as evidence that their ways are superior, and that the oppressed must learn these ways if they are to overcome their oppression (hence compensatory education). There is little point in complaining after the fact that the research has been misunderstood or misused: the damage has been done. (p142)

Indeed, it is interesting that a book which so rigorously and colourfully concentrates on language should conclude that the real obstacles for crosscultural communication are not linguistic - they consist of racial and economic exploitation: "the tendency to attribute [language deficit] to groups on a race or a class basis is a social and political problem". (p191)

Harkins emphasises the need for linguists in the field to display courtesy, and she effectively goes about devising a new methodology for research in this area: she points out that the Aboriginal school council at Alice Springs, the Yipirinya group, made their feelings clear to her "that non-Aboriginal researchers and their skills should be made use of as a resource, and that this could be achieved by means of Aboriginal control and direction of research projects ..." (p6). Harkins' book is, among other things, a plea for more interactive research to be done in this area at a time when Aboriginal heritage and Aboriginal legal rights are being better elaborated, so that other areas of 'mutual unintelligibility', between English and other Aboriginal Englishes, can be mapped and described.

However, for all its detail and scholarly apparatus, Bridging Two Worlds is not a book which should be confined to the shelves of linguists - it should be read by anyone who is involved with communicating across the Aboriginal English/English divide. Indeed, Harkins suggests that "[t]his book is for anyone who takes an interest in the English language" - and one of her most persuasive arguments is that the English language itself is greatly enriched by its contact with Aboriginal English. English, at the hands of Alice Springs people, becomes a "two-way language" (p5), a triumph of the Aboriginal spirit and a triumph of a form of communication which does not seek to stupidly minimise and demonise differences. Harkins argues that if 'standard' English has penetrated Aboriginal languages, then the semantic systems of Arrernte and Luritja have reciprocated the gesture in a more sophisticated fashion - they now directly underpin the Aboriginal English of Alice Springs. This is a momentous discovery. As Harkins says:

The question therefore seems to present itself: To what extent is this English? Would it perhaps be more accurately regarded as an Aboriginal language using the surface forms of English, a sort of massive relexification? (p168)

The answer, we now know, is yes - Bridging Two Worlds presents us with a promising glimpse of this massive relexification, and an invitation to speak English as an Aboriginal language.