“‘Because they proper black, they go “unna, true!”’ Snapshots of a sociolinguistic ethnography at a First Nations boarding school”

The participation of First Nations people in boarding schools is often associated with a brutal history of assimilation throughout colonised lands (O’Bryan, 2021). Yet, in Australia, First Nations enrolment in boarding schools continues to thrive, with over 2,200 yearly enrolments (Independent Schools Australia, 2021). While previous research on students’ experiences in boarding has noted that identity and language use are greatly impacted by boarding school experiences (Mander, 2012; O’Bryan, 2016), the sociolinguistic practices of boarders, and how these are deployed in the creation of boarders’ social identities, remain to be explored. What language varieties are spoken in boarding schools among First Nations people? What are these varieties used for? What happens when teens with diverse linguistic repertoires come to live outta country under one roof (Fraiese, Rodíguez Louro & Collard, 2022)? What linguistic features are meaningful, and how do boarders employ them to construct social identities within the school?

In this presentation, I begin to explore these questions by introducing a bespoke ethnographic corpus of spontaneous conversation among First Nations boarders collected over 14 months at a Western Australian boarding school. The field site, renamed by the students as St Mary’s Hills to protect the institution’s anonymity, is in Whadjuk Nyungar country, and is the home away from home for boarders from across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. While some students speak traditional First Nations languages such as Walmajari and Miriwoong, and new languages such as Kriol, most boarders are L1 speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, a post-invasion contact-based variety of English used by approximately 80% of First Nations people in Australia (Rodríguez Louro & Collard, 2021: 2). The dataset captures the speech of 34 female and 6 male speakers aged 12-18 years old in conversation with friends and kin. Inspired by Eckert’s (1989) canonical work with adolescents in a Detroit high school, this work provides the first sociolinguistic exploration of the linguistic experiences of First Nations communities in boarding.

References
Eckert, Penelope (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Fraiese, Lucía, Rodíguez Louro, Celeste & Collard, Glenys (2022). Outta country: Indigenous youth identities in an Australian boarding school. NWAV50. Stanford University.
Independent Schools Australia (2021). Independent Boarding Schools Data Review.
Mander, David J. (2012). The transition experience to boarding school for male Aboriginal secondary school students from regional and remote communities across Western Australia. Edith Cowan University.
O’Bryan, Marnie (2016). Shaping futures, shaping lives: An investigation into the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian boarding schools. University of Melbourne.
O’Bryan, Marnie (2021). Boarding and Australia's First Peoples: Understanding How Residential Schooling Shapes Lives. SG: Springer Nature B.V.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Collard, Glenys (2021). Australian Aboriginal English: Linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Language and Linguistics Compass 15(5): n/a.