mgpcpastor's blog

In honour of today’s Australian based national public holiday, here’s a post on Kangaroo: the international and regional word, which was prepared by the Australian National Dictionary Staff and posted on the Oxford Dictionary Blog.
Turns out that explorer James Cook and botanist Joseph Banks learned the name from local peoples while temporarily ship-wrecked in North Queensland.
Unaware of the many different linguistic forms among the peoples of the island continent they included the word in a lexicon of local language.
When Arthur Phillip made his journey to a very different region of the same continent and tried to use that lexicon hijinks ensued.
Understandably.

Here’s an excerpt:

The word kangaroo was therefore well established in international English when in 1787 Joseph Banks gave Governor Phillip a copy of his ‘New Holland language’, which included kangaroo. Phillip and his men, however, were surprised to discover that the Aborigines of the Sydney area were baffled when these Europeans pointed at the hopping animals and mouthed the word kangaroo. The local Sydney Aboriginal language had various names for the different species of this hopping creature, including bandharr, barrbaay, ganuurr, walarroo (which was borrowed to become English wallaroo), and yuluuma. It took some time before the Europeans realised that the Indigenous peoples spoke different languages (we now know that more than 250 languages were spoken at the time of European settlement), and it took them even longer to discover that Cook and Banks had taken the term for a particular species of kangaroo from the Guugu Yimidhirr, and transformed it into the English generic term for all such hopping creatures.
But the die had been cast, and kangaroo had become an ‘English’ word before European settlement of Australia, and before there were any glimmers of the language that would be called ‘Australian English’. Kangaroo is part of the language of all English speakers.
It is part of World English, at the same time as it is the most recognizable of Australian words, and one of the most enduring symbols of Australia. What most speakers of World English will not know, however, is that in the two centuries since that first ‘Australia Day’ in 1788, the word kangaroo has developed many more distinctive meanings and uses in Australian English.

Read the rest of the post to find out about those distinctive uses.