Australian Aboriginal English in Indigenous-Authored Television Series: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Lexis in Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road.

This article analyses Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) in three recent Indigenous-authored television series: Redfern Now, Cleverman, and Mystery Road. Television series and movies have traditionally introduced and reinforced negative attitudes about speakers of minority/minoritised English and nonstandard language varieties. Representations of these varieties of English tend to be selective and inaccurate. However, most linguistic research to date has examined representations in older Hollywood movies. In Australia, there has been a recent growth of Indigenous-authored television drama as well as in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander characters on television. For viewers, such characters can be an important source of information, especially if they do not regularly interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is the case for many Australian audience members, and even more so for international viewers of Australian television series that are exported overseas--as is the case for all three analysed series. This study employs lexical profiling analysis (with AntWordProfiler) to compare the use of AAE lexis across the three programs. Results show Mystery Road contains the most variety of AAE types as well as the highest proportion of AAE tokens. Cleverman includes the least variety of AAE types and the lowest proportion of AAE tokens, but the most "less-familiar" AAE lexis (engaging with the Dreaming). Redfern Now's use of AAE tokens is only slightly lower than Mystery Road, and it features a higher variety of AAE types than Cleverman. The study demonstrates that the use of such lexis is no barrier to "mainstream" popularity, critical acclaim, and international success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]