Thus the word kangaroo had become part of the English
language even before the First Fleet set sail. Cook and Banks mistakenly
thought that kangaroo was a general or generic term
for all kangaroos. Later, Banks gave Governor Phillip a vocabulary of
the ‘New Holland language' to take with him on the First Fleet,
and Phillip mistakenly thought that it must have been taken down at
Botany Bay. Members of the First Fleet employed the word in talking
to the local Aborigines, but it took them some time to realise that
the Aborigines of the Sydney region did not understand the words that
had been collected near Cooktown. David Collins, a naval officer who
was appointed Deputy Judge-Advocate at Botany Bay in 1786, was one of
the more astute observers. In his An Account of the English Colony
in New South Wales (1798), he notes that the words adopted from
the Sydney Aborigines pertained exclusively to the external world: ‘our
knowledge of their language consisted at this time of only a few terms
for such things as, being visible, could not well be mistaken; but no
one had yet attained words enough to convey an idea in connected terms’.
Collins recognised that the Sydney language was very different from
the language Cook had recorded in northern Queensland: ‘The dialect
spoken by the natives at Sydney not only differs entirely from that
left us by Captain Cook of the people with whom he had intercourse to
the northward, (about Endeavour river,) but also from that spoken by
those natives who lived at Port Stephens, and to the southward of Botany-Bay,
(about Adventure Bay,) as well as on the banks of the Hawkesbury’.
We now know that when the First Fleet arrived in 1788 there were about
300,000 Aborigines in Australia, divided into roughly 600 tribal groups,
each with about 500 members. Thus there were at least 600 dialects.
And there were more, since clans within tribes sometimes had their own
dialect. Yet to speak of dialects is misleading—within these groupings,
there were in fact some 250 distinct languages, each as different from
one another as English is different from, German, French, Italian, Latin,
Greek, Sanskrit, and Hindi.
In the first 100 years of European settlement and exploration about
400 words were borrowed into Australian English from some 80 languages.
Most of the borrowings were from the languages spoken in or near the
major points of settlement.
The Dharuk language was spoken in the area around Sydney, and this
language provided a large number of very familiar words. They include
(with the year in which they were first recorded indicated):
bettong (1802)
boobook (1790)
boomerang (1790)
burrawang (1790)
corroboree (1790)
dingo (1789)
geebung (1790)
gibber (1790)
gunyah (1803)
koala (1798)
koradji (1793)
kurrajong (1801)
nulla-nulla (1790)
paddymelon (1802)
potoroo (1789)
waddy (1790)
wallaby (1798)
wallaroo (1826)
waratah (1788)
warrigal (1790)
wombat (1798)
woomera (1793)
Borrowings from other NSW Aboriginal are fewer and later, as exploration
and settlement spread out from the central hub of Sydney. Borrowings
from the Kamilaroi language of eastern New South Wales include:
brolga (1896)
budgerigar (1840)
bora (1850)
gilgai (1867)
Borrowings from the Yuwaalaraay language of northern New South Wales
include:
bilby (1885)
galah (1862)
gidgee (1862)
Borrowings from the Wiradhuri languages of south-western New South
Wales include:
corella (1859)
gang-gang (1833)
kookaburra (1834)
quandong (1836)
In terms of number of borrowings, the only language that compares
with Dharuk is the Nyungar language of south-western Western Australia.
There was a European settlement at the present site of Albany in 1826,
but the major settlement was on the Swan River in 1829. Many words for
flora and fauna were borrowed from Nyungar. They include:
boodie (1842)
chuditch (1842)
dalgite (1840)
dibbler (1850)
gnow (1840)
jarrah (1833)
karri (1866)
kylie (1835)
mardo (1839)
marl (1840)
morrel (1837)
mundarda (1840)
noolbenger (1842)
numbat (1842)
quenda (1839)
quokka (1842)
tammar (1847)
wambenger (1928)
woylie (1842)
The words borrowed from Indigenous languages are almost exclusively
nouns, and they refer to the external world. Most of the borrowings
are terms for flora and fauna, followed by words for religion and ceremony,
implements, and features of the environment, suggesting that there was
no interest on the part of the colonisers in understanding any of the
conceptual aspects of Indigenous cultures.
Some adjectives and verbs were borrowed into the Australian pidgin
that was spoken in the nineteenth century. Most of these have now disappeared,
but two important words have survived. These are bung
(1841) and yakka (1847), both borrowed from the Yagara
language of the Brisbane region.
