Displayed monologues: Speech beyond the typical speaker-addressee dyad in Aboriginal Australia

Many of the ancestral languages of Australia’s 250+ Aboriginal cultures employ extensive avoidance registers used in speech situations involving community members with whom one is prohibited from interacting under local cultural laws, so called 'avoidance relatives'. The main function of an avoidance register is to signal that the speaker is *not* addressing the avoidance relative directly, as they would do in regular conversation. I refer to this speech practice as 'displayed monologue'.

The present study provides a first detailed description of an avoidance register called Yalan, traditionally spoken by the Ngarinyin Aborinal people of Western Australia. It presents several aspects of Yalan that are not commonly given much prominence in the wider literature on Aboriginal avoidance speech and analyses it as a radical, but predictable, variation on the speaker-addressee dyadic model. I argue that examining phenomena like displayed monologue helps to better understand the dialogic nature of language.