Artificial language, natural history: Speech, sign, and sound in the emergence of Damin

•Critique of natural, as opposed to artificial, language as proper object of study.•Damin male initiate speech register frequently labeled an 'invented language.'•Initiate signed language (Marlda Kangka) served as a substrate for Damin.•Phonetically marked forms initially used as paralinguistic accompaniments to sign.•Damin is socially emergent rather than the singular invention of an individual.

The Lardil male initiate language, Damin, is a unique linguistic system. Traditionally employed by second-order male initiates, or warama, Damin has a lexicon of no more than 150 distinct morphemes and a phonology employing ejectives and clicks-sound types unattested in other Australian languages. These esoteric features have led scholars to see Damin as an artificial or invented language. I argue that the label of linguistic artificiality forestalls explanation as much as it aids it. In this paper I show that the eccentric features of Damin developed in an emergent and unplanned manner in which conventionalized paralinguistic phonations became semanticized as they were linked up with a signed language, Marlda Kangka, employed by first-order male initiates, or luruku.