Organising diversity: naming groups and their languages in Indigenous Australia

This paper builds an understanding of the diverse naming practices in Indigenous Australian communities through an examination of group and language naming in four regions: Cape York Peninsula in north-eastern Australia, the Western Desert region in western Australia, and among speakers of two language groups of coastal northern Australia (Yolŋu Matha varieties in eastern Arnhem Land and Burarra in north-central Arnhem Land). These descriptions draw from the literature and from the authors’ community-engaged fieldwork in Arnhem Land. We describe the range of strategies speakers use to divide up their local language ecologies, practices for naming lects and the role of variation in the processes of differentiation and connection. Naming practices across these areas show some interesting similarities, but also striking differences. Language and group naming systems are local ways of organising diversity. The study of naming is at the very heart of the concerns of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology: linking the social, political, geographic and linguistic. It is important because it has a bearing on how people see themselves and others, and on how they construct “same” and “different”. In the contemporary world, where diversity is seen by states and institutions as a problem – a “logistical headache” (Migge and Léglise 2013: 1) – studying local perspectives can open our eyes to other ways of understanding and valuing diversity. A key benefit for researchers is that it provides an opportunity to come face-to-face with our own erroneous assumptions. In this paper, we highlight the value of bringing to the fore speakers’ conceptions of differentiation and of divisions within the language ecology, and the importance of attending to the views of all relevant social actors in grasping locally salient sociolinguistic processes.