As with many First Nations people around the world, Australian Aboriginal peoples have suffered dispossession and continue to experience educational and socio-economic disadvantage. This narrative, however, fails to recognise their inherent strength reflected in over 60,000 years of living history in Australia.  A number of factors contribute to this resilience – one receiving scant attention over the years is humour. Of those studies that have explored this, the focus has been pragmatics (Garde, 2008), performance (Austin, 2016), and ‘code-switching’ McConvell (1988), with adult speakers.

In this presentation I explore the humour of Australian Aboriginal primary school-aged students as they have fun, joke and ‘kid around’. The focus is cohorts living in rural, regional and remote locations of Australia.  Specifically, naturalistic language data were collected in seven schools located within Western Australian. 230 children and their teachers were recorded both in their classrooms and playgrounds.  Whilst earlier studies incorporated codeswitching to reflect how the speakers’ use their various linguistic codes, in this study, reflecting the current state of the field, we base our analysis on translanguaging and the fluid movement that occurs between languages.  The findings show how these students draw on their full linguistic repertoire to have fun and to interact humorously with each other – moving between Australian Aboriginal English, traditional languages, Standard Australian English and Kriol - a creole used in some remote locations. 

References

Austin, K. (2016). Aboriginal Humour: An investigation into the nature and purposes of Indigenous Australian performance humour and its contributions to Australian culture. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Flinders University. 

Garde, M. (2008). The pragmatics of rude jokes with Grandad: Joking relationships in Aboriginal Australia, Anthropological Forum, 18:3, 235-253.

McConvell, P. 1988. “Mix-im-up: Aboriginal code-switching, old and new”. In Codeswitching: Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives, (Ed., M. Heller) pp. 97–149. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.