The language, called Light Warlpiri, was invented by children who appear to have mixed their local Aboriginal tongue, Warlpiri, with English and Kriol, an English-based creole spoken mainly by Aborigines in the country’s north.
Light Warlpiri is spoken by about 350 people – all believed to be aged under 35 – in the town of Lajamanu, which has a population of 850 and is about 550 miles south of Darwin.
Lajamanu is about 550 miles south of Darwin
The language was discovered by an American linguist, Carmel O'Shannessy, who has documented her findings in Language, a journal of the Linguistic Society of America. She said she made her discovery while she was working in a school and noticed that the children seemed to mix various languages in single sentences.
“I decided to investigate it," she told LiveScience.
"Once I recorded children speaking, I looked at the patterns and I could see that there were very striking systematic patterns. It was then that I realized this was a system of its own."
The language is believed to have emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when children went from switching between English, Kriol and Warlpiri to primarily speaking the mixed Light Warlpiri language. Its creation may be linked to the remoteness of the town, which receives supplies from a truck once a week and is 350 miles from the nearest commercial centre, Katherine.
"It seems that the people who are about 35 years old are the ones who created the system and brought in the innovation in the verbal auxiliary," Dr O'Shannessy said.
"They then passed it on to their children, and it will probably get passed on to subsequent generations… The striking thing about Light Warlpiri is that most of the verbs come from English or Kriol, but most of the other grammatical elements in the sentence come from Warlpiri.”
An example of a Light Warlpiri sentence, provided by Dr O'Shannessy on her website at the University of Michigan, is: “De-m run back rarralykaji-kirra jarntu an yapa-wat ngapa-kujaku”. It translates as: “The dog and the people run back to the car to get out of the rain”.
An Australian linguist, Mary Laughren, said it was very rare to document a “new” language during the early period of its existence.
"Many of the first speakers of this language are still alive," she told the Sydney Morning Herald.