"So many people spoke to kids this way so consistently that the kids started to internalize it as a single system," O'Shannessy said. From there, the natural tendency of kids to imitate each other took hold. "Warlpiri children when they're quite young spend a lot of time playing with each other -- people spend most of their time outside. The kids are interacting with each other a lot, and they modeled their language learning on other kids."

Over time, it became systemic -- Light Warlpiri, which has English verbs and Warlpiri nouns, is now the primary way children and young adults in the area communicate with each other.

What's interesting about Light Warlpiri is that it includes entirely new constructions using the best of both tongues -- for example, it uses "yu'm" as a corollary the English "I'm."

O'Shannessy's personal site features examples of how this works. The blue is the original Warlpiri, the red comes from English or Kriol, and the green represents newly invented language:

Mixed languages like this are extremely rare, and the kind like Light Warlpiri, which have the verb structure from one language and nouns from another are even less common, O'Shannessy said. (Other examples in this category are Gurindji Kriol, another Northern Territory language, and Michif, a language spoken in the United States and Canada that combines the Native American Cree language and French.) Light Warlpiri is the newest -- its oldest speakers are only 35 years old.

O'Shannessy said her research shows that new languages can sprout from unexpected places -- even random ranching jobs.

"It tells us that the situation the people are interacting in shapes the linguistic processing taking place," she said. "It shows that our social lives and our linguistic lives are interrelated."