I spent last week in Australia, and had some experiences that made the trip well worth the long flight. I devoured what I am reasonably sure is the best lamb meat pie on earth, I saw an echidna and I had some illuminating conversations about linguistics with professors and students. In one of those conversations, I learned about a language kerfuffle from a few years ago that took me back to the 1990s, and reminded me of how beautiful and complex nonstandard speech can be.

In 2021, Mark McGowan, who was then the premier of Western Australia, made a video informing Aboriginal people about safety precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic. He stood next to an Aboriginal interpreter, who translated his statements into Kriol, the language many Aboriginal people in Australia speak. So, for instance, when McGowan said, “This is an important message to keep Aboriginal people safe,” it was followed by the interpreter saying, “Dijan message i proper important-one to keep-im everybody safe-one.”

Commentary in and out of Australia was mean, calling it racist and condescending for McGowan to have statements directed at Aboriginal people translated into mere baby talk. Typical was “This isn’t a mix of languages, this is just ignorant usage of English. Apparently saying this is ‘bad English’ is racist, but I guess I’m a racist because this is just bad English.”

The dust-up revealed that even in Australia, many people are unaware that Aboriginal people have transformed English into a new language entirely. To many people, the idea that Kriol is a legitimate form of speech is unfamiliar, and even absurd. It reminded me of the American public’s reaction to Ebonics — i.e., Black English — in 1996, when the school board in Oakland, Calif., suggested that Black children would learn to read more easily if Black English were presented alongside standard English as a teaching strategy.

In both cases, people miss that nonstandard speech is not, in any scientific sense, substandard. These forms of speech are not broken. In fact, there is order, subtlety, and even majesty in these ways of talking.

When colonizing Australia, the English encountered Indigenous people speaking many languages. A makeshift pidgin emerged for use between them and the white people, using English words mixed with some from the local languages, and just enough grammatical structure — a mere sprinkle — to allow basic communication. This was not a real, distinct language.