How Warumungu people express new concepts

14 January 2010

This article describes strategies used by Warumungu speakers to create new words and ways of expressing new concepts, in the context of multilingual society in which speakers of Indigenous Australian languages view language as a property. The strategies include borrowing, onomatopoeia, compounding, derivation, extension of existing words, including polysemous extensions such as actual/potential and container/contained