Picture a man speaking fluently, grammatically, performing every marker of ordinary conversation — while standing two feet from a person he is legally forbidden to address. He is not whispering. He is not silent. He is speaking as if he were alone. The person he cannot talk to hears every word.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the operating logic of avoidance registers found across many of Australia's Aboriginal languages, speech systems built for exactly this kind of social impossibility: situations where custom prohibits direct interaction with certain relatives — in-laws, people linked by marriage rules, specific kin categories — but where the two people still need to occupy the same physical space. I went looking for Damin, the invented initiation language sometimes associated with the Lardil, expecting to find documentation of it in the current research pool. I didn't. What I found instead was something the field has been working through more recently and in more empirical depth: the linguistics of avoidance speech itself, and a new description of one such system, Yalan, that tells us more about how these registers actually function than most popular accounts of "secret Aboriginal languages" ever manage.
The Grammar of Pretending You're Alone
Yalan is an avoidance register traditionally used by the Ngarinyin people of Western Australia, and it has just received its first detailed linguistic description, published by Stef Spronck in the International Journal of Language and Culture (John Benjamins). The mechanism is elegant and strange at once. When an avoidance relative is present, the speaker shifts into Yalan and talks as though engaged in soliloquy — formal, intentional solitude speech, the kind of talking-to-oneself that linguist Yoko Hasegawa described in a different context back in 2011. Spronck borrows that framework and gives the Ngarinyin practice a name: "displayed monologue." The speaker isn't hiding the fact that they're performing solitude. They're showing it. The avoidance relative is meant to recognize, through specific linguistic markers, that they are being spoken past rather than spoken to.
What makes this more than a curiosity is what it reveals about the speakers' own understanding of language. Spronck argues that Yalan demonstrates a sophisticated, built-in awareness among its speakers of what linguists call the dialogicity of language — the fact that any utterance implies a listener, a social relationship, an audience. Yalan works precisely because speakers can selectively suppress that implication through grammar, and because everyone present recognizes the suppression as a deliberate, structured act rather than an accident. That is a remarkable thing for an everyday speech practice to encode: not just vocabulary for avoidance, but a shared, metapragmatic theory of what talking does to the people around you.
Why These Systems Are Disappearing Faster Than They Can Be Recorded
Avoidance registers like Yalan sit inside ancestral languages that are themselves vanishing. More than 250 distinct Aboriginal languages were spoken before colonisation, with some researchers counting closer to 600–800 once overlapping dialects and community-specific varieties are included (Australian Geographic). Estimates now put the number still spoken at around 40, with only about 12 being passed on to children as a first language (The Conversation). Australia accounts for roughly 9% of the world's critically endangered languages while representing only 2% of languages spoken globally — one of the steepest concentrations of linguistic risk anywhere on the planet.
A register like Yalan is especially fragile within that collapse, because it is a layer built on top of an already-endangered base language. You cannot practice avoidance speech if the kinship system it serves has eroded, and you cannot maintain the kinship system's full texture without speakers who still command the register that enacts it. Documentation efforts — AIATSIS's language revival work among them — are racing to capture dictionaries and grammars before the last fluent speakers of underlying languages are gone, let alone the specialized registers layered on top (Australian Geographic).
What a Register Like This Actually Protects
It's tempting to file avoidance speech under "fascinating cultural trivia" and move on. I'd resist that. Yalan isn't a workaround for an awkward social rule — it is the social rule, made audible. It encodes, in real time, a theory of who is allowed to be addressed, under what conditions, and how a community signals respect through calibrated absence rather than presence. When a register like this disappears, what's lost isn't a word list. It's a piece of machinery for managing human relationships that took generations to build and that no translation can fully carry forward. The next wave of fieldwork on Australian avoidance speech will tell us how many of these systems survive in active use, and how many now exist only in the memory of elders describing what their grandparents once did without needing to explain it at all.