• Corpus ID: 44220686

Linguistic prehistory of the Australian boab

@inproceedings{McConvell2014LinguisticPO,
  title={Linguistic prehistory of the Australian boab},
  author={Patrick McConvell and Thomas Saunders and Stef Spronck},
  year={2014}
}

• P. McConvell, T. Saunders, Stef Spronck
• Published 2014
• Linguistics

Boabs, a close relation of the African baobabs, are found only in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and a region close by in the Northern Territory. Here several of the words for the boab tree and its parts are examined with special emphasis on loanwords which cross language family boundaries going in a west-east direction. It is proposed that this linguistic diffusion may reflect dispersal of the tree into new areas on the east, in relatively recent times. On the other hand another recent diffusion from the west of new salient functions of the boab fruit spread a new term to central Kimberley where boabs are known to have been present and used by humans for many thousands of years.