Australia’s oldest words
Every country where English is spoken has contributed local words to an already large vocabulary. Every day in Australia we use words originating from some of the hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.
For obvious reasons, many of these words are the names of plants and animals. The earliest Europeans to land on these shores were gobsmacked by the weird creatures they encountered. While they sometimes adapted terms from the Old Country, such as magpie and lyrebird, in many cases they used the local people’s names for the birds, marsupials or plants around them: budgerigar, kookaburra (from the Wiradjuri gugubarra, imitating the bird’s call), koala, kangaroo, waratah …
Other Aboriginal-derived words in common use in Australian English today include:
bunyip (a scary imaginary creature, usually haunting a swamp or billabong—billabong is derived from the Wiradjuri bila, meaning river)
yakka (work)
yabber (to talk)
humpy (a hut)
willy-willy (a spiralling wind or dust devil).
Some words commonly thought to be of Australian Aboriginal origin are not. For example:
Nullarbor (from the Latin for ‘no trees’)
goanna (from iguana)
didjeridu or didgeridoo (probably coined by white settlers in imitation of the instrument’s sound)
emu (from the Portuguese ema for ostrich or cassowary).
Many Aboriginal Australian communities have geographically specific terms for themselves (and their languages), and it shows respect to use these where known, rather than a generic ‘Aboriginal man’ or ‘Indigenous woman’, for example:
Koori or Koorie (a person from southern NSW or Victoria)
Nyungar (from south-western WA)—also Nyunga, Nyoongah, Noongar
Murri (from parts of Queensland and NSW)
Yolngu (from north-eastern Arnhem Land).
‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ are capitalised when referring to the original Australian peoples, and are used as adjectives rather than nouns: ‘an Aboriginal person’ is preferable to ‘an Aboriginal’ or ‘an Aborigine’. ‘Indigenous’ can be used to encompass both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
