budgerigar

The word budgerigar comes from the Yuwaalaraay language of northwestern New South Wales, where the word is most commonly reconstructed as betcherry-gah or budgeri-gar, with budgeri meaning 'good' or 'tasty' (used as a general term of approbation, roughly equivalent to 'good' in English) and gar meaning 'cockatoo' or 'parrot.' The full term thus means something like 'good parrot' or 'tasty parrot' — the latter sense reflecting the fact that budgerigars were an important food source for Yuwaalaraay and neighboring peoples. The small parrots traveled in flocks of extraordinary size across the arid interior of Australia, following the irregular rains that triggered mass flowering of the grasses on which they fed. When the rains came and the birds descended on a location in their thousands, they were harvested. The word records an ecological relationship: a good food bird in the right season.

John Gould, the British ornithologist who systematically described and illustrated Australian birds in the 1840s, recorded the word and applied it as the English common name for Melopsittacus undulatus — the species he was the first to formally describe. Gould spent time in Australia in 1838 and 1839, collecting specimens and working with Aboriginal informants to learn the local names for birds. His decision to use the Aboriginal name rather than coin a Latin-origin English name — as was common practice — meant that the Yuwaalaraay word entered scientific and popular circulation simultaneously. By the time the first live budgerigars arrived in Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, the name traveled with them.

The popularity of the budgerigar as a cage bird spread with extraordinary speed through Victorian Britain, and then throughout Europe and North America. The birds were cheap, easy to keep, capable of mimicking human speech, and available in a widening range of color mutations as captive breeding intensified. By the early twentieth century, budgerigars were the most numerous pet bird on earth, a position they have never relinquished. The English language simplified the name through multiple routes: 'budgerigar' in formal use, 'budgie' in universal colloquial use throughout Britain and Australia, and 'parakeet' in American English, which often displaced the Aboriginal name entirely in North American markets.

The Yuwaalaraay language today is spoken by very few people — estimates suggest fewer than a hundred fluent speakers survive, and efforts at language revival are ongoing. The word budgerigar carries an acute irony: while the language that produced it faces extinction, the word itself has been exported into every language that has a pet-bird trade, from Japanese to Swedish to Portuguese. The name that meant 'good parrot' in a language of the Australian interior now appears on three hundred million birdcages worldwide. The language is endangered; the word is not. The relationship between a language's vitality and the global circulation of its words is one that colonial history has made consistently strange.