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91-441: Bininj Kunwok is an Australian Aboriginal language which includes six dialects: Kunwinjku (formerly Gunwinggu ), Kuninjku , Kundjeyhmi (formerly Gundjeihmi ), Manyallaluk Mayali ( Mayali ), Kundedjnjenghmi , and two varieties of Kune (Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek). Kunwinjku is the dominant dialect, and also sometimes used to refer to the group. The spellings Bininj Gun-wok and Bininj Kun-Wok have also been used in

182-588: A finite VP constituent altogether, do not acknowledge the distinction. In other words, all languages are non-configurational for DGs, even English, which all phrase structure grammars take for granted as having a finite VP constituent. The point is illustrated with the following examples: Phrase structure grammars almost unanimously assume that the finite VP in bold in the first sentence is a constituent. DGs, in contrast, do not see finite VPs as constituents. Both phrase structure grammars and DGs do, however, see non-finite VPs as constituents. The dependency structure of

273-459: A 'pressed' voice quality , with the glottal opening narrower than in modal voice, a relatively high frequency of creaky voice , and low airflow. This may be due to an avoidance of breathy voice . This pressed quality could therefore serve to enhance the clarity of speech and ensure the perception of place of articulation distinctions. Probably every Australian language with speakers remaining has had an orthography developed for it, in each case in

364-696: A complete absence of uvular consonants and only a few languages with a glottal stop . Both stops and nasals occur at all six places, and in many languages laterals occur at all four coronal places. Andrew Butcher speculates that the unusual segmental inventories of Australian languages may be due to the very high presence of otitis media ear infections and resulting hearing loss in their populations. People with hearing loss often have trouble distinguishing different vowels and hearing fricatives and voicing contrasts. Australian Aboriginal languages thus seem to avoid sounds and distinctions which are difficult for people with early childhood hearing loss to perceive. At

455-532: A conception of Universal Grammar which accurately accounts for both polysynthetic languages and non-polysynthetic languages. He asserts that the polysynthetic languages must conform to a syntactic rule he calls the " polysynthesis parameter ", and that as a result will show a special set of syntactic properties. Following this parameter, one property of polysynthetic languages is non-rigid phrase structure, making these languages non-configurational. To support his claim he considers three features of non-configurationality:

546-456: A few cases the [u] has been unrounded to give [i, ɯ, a] . There is almost never a voicing contrast ; that is, a consonant may sound like a [p] at the beginning of a word, but like a [b] between vowels, and either letter could be (and often is) chosen to represent it. Australia also stands out as being almost entirely free of fricative consonants , even of [h] . In the few cases where fricatives do occur, they developed recently through

637-514: A few languages which employ only nominative–accusative case marking. The following represents a canonical 6-place Australian Aboriginal consonant system. It does not represent any single language, but is instead a simplified form of the consonant inventory of what would be found in many Australian languages, including most Arandic and Yolŋu languages. A typical Australian phonological inventory includes just three vowels, usually /i, u, a/ , which may occur in both long and short variants. In

728-547: A few nearby islands. The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings. Despite this uncertainty, the Indigenous Australian languages are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages", or the "Australian family". The term can include both Tasmanian languages and the Western Torres Strait language , but

819-657: A link between Australian and Papuan languages, the latter being represented by those spoken on the coastal areas of New Guinea facing the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea . In 1986 William A. Foley noted lexical similarities between Robert M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the East New Guinea Highlands languages . He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been

910-448: A model, Maria Vilkuna coined and Katalin Kiss developed the concept of discourse-configurationality to describe languages where constituent order is primarily determined by pragmatic factors. Non-configurationality and discourse-configurationality are mutually independent. The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure defines "discourse-configurational" as referring to "languages in which

1001-400: A particular phrase structure configuration is systematically and exclusively associated with some Information Structure category falling under the notions of Topic and Focus." Those associated with Topic status are more specifically called "topic-configurational," while those associated with Focus status are called "focus-configurational." Hungarian is discourse-configurational. Warlpiri

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1092-471: A recent umbrella term for a group of mutually intelligible dialects, Bininj Kunwok itself is not included in the Australian census, however the individual dialects are. In the 2021 census, 1494 people reported being Kunwinjku language speakers, as well as 423 of Kuninjku, 257 of Kune, 71 of Mayali and 12 of Gundjeihmi (Kundjeyhmi), totalling 2,257 speakers. Kundedjnjenghmi was not offered as an option according to

1183-611: A result of the Adjunct Licensing Condition, and following this, the Chain Condition. The Adjunct Licensing Condition states that an argument type phrase XP generated in the adjoined positions licensed if and only if it forms a chain with a unique null pronominal in an argument position. The Chain Condition states that X and Y may form a chain only under certain conditions. Namely, X c-commands Y, X and Y are coindexed, there

1274-420: A single argument thus yielding discontinuous expressions. Additionally because nominals act as adjuncts, they are not required to have a fixed word order. Following this, the function of nominals in non-configurational languages is, similar to adjoined clauses, to add more information to the verbal argument or the predicate. Linguist Mark Baker considers polysynthesis , making specific use of Mohawk, to provide

1365-778: A single landmass (called the Sahul continent ) for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. Dixon, in the meantime, later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal. Glottolog 4.1 (2019) recognises 23 independent families and 9 isolates in Australia, comprising a total of 32 independent language groups. According to Claire Bowern 's Australian Languages (2011), Australian languages divide into approximately 30 primary sub-groups and 5 isolates. It has been inferred from

1456-489: A study in Diachronica that hypothesised, by analysing noun class prefix paradigms across both Pama-Nyungan and the minority non-Pama-Nyungan languages, that a Proto-Australian could be reconstructed from which all known Australian languages descend. This Proto-Australian language, they concluded, would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago in northern Australia. For a long time unsuccessful attempts were made to detect

1547-529: A widespread pattern is for pronouns (or first and second persons ) to have nominative – accusative case marking and for third person to be ergative–absolutive , though splits between animate and inanimate are also found. In some languages the persons in between the accusative and ergative inflections (such as second person, or third-person human) may be tripartite : that is, marked overtly as either ergative or accusative in transitive clauses, but not marked as either in intransitive clauses. There are also

1638-497: Is a language of the large Pama-Nyungan language family and is spoken in Central Australia by more than 3000 people. It has four main dialects: Yuendumu Warlpiri, Willowra Warlpiri, Lajamanu Warlpiri, and Wakirti Warlpiri, which are spoken across the region. It displays the three main characteristics of non-configurationality, namely free word order, extensive use of null anaphora, and discontinuous expressions. According to Hale,

1729-515: Is a valid language family. However, few other linguists accept Dixon's thesis. For example, Kenneth L. Hale describes Dixon's scepticism as an erroneous phylogenetic assessment which is "such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte". Hale provides pronominal and grammatical evidence (with suppletion) as well as more than fifty basic-vocabulary cognates (showing regular sound correspondences) between

1820-509: Is an abnormal vowel inventory for one of the Australian Aboriginal languages , as most of them simply have a three-vowel /i/ , /u/ , /a/ system with length distinctions. Bininj Kunwok is unique in that it does not have length distinctions for vowels (despite having them for consonants), and has the mid vowels /e/ and /o/ as well as the usual three. Bininj Kunwok is polysynthetic , with grammatical relations largely encoded within

1911-483: Is as follows: S --> (AUX) α α* (with α = N, V, or particle) Pronominals are freely ordered with respect to the other words in the sentence, and behave as other nominals do. This is in contrast to the sentence structure of a configurational language, such as English, with a basic sentence phrase structure following: S --> NP VP. Warlpiri verbs are always argument-taking predicates and Warlpiri nominals are always arguments or argument-taking predicates. This

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2002-531: Is characteristic of more careful speech, while these sounds tend to be apical in rapid speech. Kalaw Lagaw Ya and many other languages in North Queensland differ from most other Australian languages in not having a retroflexive series. The dental series th, nh, lh are always laminal (that is, pronounced by touching with the surface of the tongue just above the tip, called the blade of the tongue), but may be formed in one of three different ways, depending on

2093-502: Is highly unusual. The anticipatory assimilation of nasality is quite common in various languages around the world. Typically, a vowel will become nasalized before a following nasal consonant. However, this process is resisted in Australian languages. There was a historical process in many languages where nasal + stop C 1 C 2 clusters lost the nasal element if C INIT was a nasal. Also, many languages have morphophonemic alterations whereby initial nasals in suffixes are denasalized if

2184-488: Is mainly agglutinating , with fusion zones at the edges of the word. Bininj Kunwok shows syntactic patterns characteristic of 'non-configurational' languages : nominal modifiers can appear without the N head (typical of many Australian languages ), there is no rigid order within the 'nominal group', and the distinction between predicative and argumental use of nominals is hard to make. Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in

2275-461: Is meaningless because dependency-based structures do not acknowledge a finite VP constituent. The following trees illustrate the distinction: Non-configurational languages have a seemingly 'flat' constituent structure, as illustrated above. The presence of the VP constituent in the configurational tree on the left allows one to define the syntactic relations (subject vs. object) in terms of configuration:

2366-503: Is no barrier containing Y but not X and X and Y are non distinct in morphosyntactic features. Baker also considers Hale proposed third element of non-configurationality: the existence of discontinuous expressions. The range of discontinuous expressions of a polysynthetic language is determined primarily by lexical factors. This suggests that a language that allows a wider range of discontinuous expressions perhaps has more ways of licensing NP expressions. In considering polysynthesis through

2457-541: Is not aspirated, even in Kalaw Lagaw Ya, despite its other stops being aspirated. The other apical series is the retroflex, rt, rn, rl (or rd, rn, rl ). Here the place is further back in the mouth, in the postalveolar or prepalatal region. The articulation is actually most commonly subapical ; that is, the tongue curls back so that the underside of the tip makes contact. That is, they are true retroflex consonants . It has been suggested that subapical pronunciation

2548-545: Is shown in the tree structure to the right of ngaju-rna mijipurru ( "I am short" ) in Warlpiri, with the nominals ngaju ( "I" ) and mijipurru ( "short" ) acting as either an argument-taking predicate or argument, depending on the category of the AUX -rna ( "am" ). In this sentence, the AUX is first person singular, indicating that ngaju must act as an argument and that mijipurru must act as an argument-taking predicate in order for

2639-565: Is succeeded by the Nyingarn Project , which digitises manuscripts and crowdsources transcriptions through DigiVol. In recent decades, there have been attempts to revive indigenous languages. Significant challenges exist, however, for the revival of languages in the dominant English language culture of Australia. The Kaurna language , spoken by the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, has been

2730-456: Is the lack of relation between lexical structure (LS) and phrase structure (PS) of sentences in Warlpiri that permits the three characteristics of non-configurationality to be present: The major (lexical) categories of Warlpiri include N, V, and PV (proverb) and the minor (functional) categories include AUX (verbs) and particles, conjunctions, and clitics, which are all part of the category Particles. The general Warlpiri sentence phrase structure

2821-533: Is the large number of places of articulation . Some 10-15% of Australian languages have four places of articulation, with two coronal places of articulation, 40-50% have five places, and 40-45% have six places of articulation, including four coronals. The four-way distinction in the coronal region is commonly accomplished through two variables: the position of the tongue (front, alveolar or dental, or retroflex ), and its shape ( apical or laminal ). There are also bilabial , velar and often palatal consonants , but

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2912-626: Is thought to be of particular benefit to the emotional well-being of Indigenous children . There is some evidence to suggest that the reversal of the Indigenous language shift may lead to decreased self-harm and suicide rates among Indigenous youth. The first Aboriginal people to use Australian Aboriginal languages in the Australian parliament were Aden Ridgeway on 25 August 1999 in the Senate when he said "On this special occasion, I make my presence known as an Aborigine and to this chamber I say, perhaps for

3003-692: The Latin script . Sounds not found in English are usually represented by digraphs , or more rarely by diacritics , such as underlines, or extra symbols, sometimes borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet . Some examples are shown in the following table. Non-configurational language The concept of non-configurationality was developed by grammarians working within Noam Chomsky 's generative framework. Some of these linguists observed that

3094-574: The Pama–Nyungan family , a family accepted by most linguists, with Robert M. W. Dixon as a notable exception. For convenience, the rest of the languages, all spoken in the far north, are commonly lumped together as "Non-Pama–Nyungan", although this does not necessarily imply that they constitute a valid clade . Dixon argues that after perhaps 40,000 years of mutual influence, it is no longer possible to distinguish deep genealogical relationships from areal features in Australia, and that not even Pama–Nyungan

3185-533: The genetic relationship to the mainland Australian languages of the former is unknown, while the latter is Pama–Nyungan , though it shares features with the neighbouring Papuan , Eastern Trans-Fly languages, in particular Meriam Mir of the Torres Strait Islands , as well as the Papuan Tip Austronesian languages. Most Australian languages belong to the widespread Pama–Nyungan family, while

3276-429: The lenition (weakening) of stops, and are therefore non-sibilants like [ð] rather than the sibilants like [s] that are common elsewhere in the world. Some languages also have three rhotics , typically a flap , a trill , and an approximant (that is, like the combined rhotics of English and Spanish) and many have four laterals. Besides the lack of fricatives, the most striking feature of Australian speech sounds

3367-512: The 12 original languages spoken in the Kakadu area are regularly spoken: Kundjeyhmi, Kunwinjku and Jawoyn . Kundjeyhmi and Kunwinjku are dialects of Bininj Kunwok, while Jawoyn is a separate language spoken in the southern areas. As of June 2015, the Gundjeihmi dialect group officially adopted standard Kunwinjku orthography, meaning it would in future be spelt Kundjeyhmi . Bininj Kunwok is typical of

3458-579: The 1900s at Daisy Bates Online provides a valuable resource for those researching especially Western Australian languages, and some languages of the Northern Territory and South Australia . The project is co-ordinated by Nick Thieberger , who works in collaboration with the National Library of Australia "to have all the microfilmed images from Section XII of the Bates papers digitised". The project

3549-514: The 5 places of articulation of stops/sibilants. Where vowels are concerned, it has 8 vowels with some morpho-syntactic as well as phonemic length contrasts ( i iː , e eː , a aː , ə əː , ɔ ɔː , o oː , ʊ ʊː , u uː ), and glides that distinguish between those that are in origin vowels, and those that in origin are consonants. Kunjen and other neighbouring languages have also developed contrasting aspirated consonants ( [pʰ] , [t̪ʰ] , [tʰ] , [cʰ] , [kʰ] ) not found further south. Descriptions of

3640-479: The AUX not only marks grammatical relations but it also a constituent containing case marked fully referential clitic pronouns that serve as verbal arguments. Since nominals are never verb arguments they can be omitted, without violating the projection principle. Subsequently, Jelinek explains the free word order and apparent discontinuous expressions of non-configurational languages. Since nominals are not related to arguments, more than one nominal may be adjoined to

3731-585: The Australian Standard Classification of Languages (ASCL). Evans (2003), who introduced the cover term Bininj Gun-wok for all dialects, identifies six dialects: Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Gundjeihmi (now Kundjeyhmi), Manyallaluk Mayali, Kundedjnjenghmi, and two varieties of Kune most commonly known as Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek; based on the fact that As of 2020, AUSTLANG , under the title "N186: Bininj Gun-Wok / Bininj Kunwok", cites Evans' grouping, but adds that others have used Kunwinjku as

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3822-408: The C 1 (C 2 ) position, and are most commonly sonorant + obstruent sequences. In languages with pre-stopped nasals or laterals, those sounds only occur at C 1 . Australian languages typically resist certain connected speech processes which might blur the place of articulation of consonants at C 1 (C 2 ), such as anticipatory assimilation of place of articulation, which is common around

3913-534: The IPA sense of the term, and indeed they contrast with true palatals in Yanyuwa . In Kalaw Lagaw Ya, the palatal consonants are sub-phonemes of the alveolar sibilants /s/ and /z/ . These descriptions do not apply exactly to all Australian languages, as the notes regarding Kalaw Lagaw Ya demonstrate. However, they do describe most of them, and are the expected norm against which languages are compared. Some have suggested that

4004-549: The North Queensland Regional Aboriginal Corporation Language Centre (NQRACLC) in 2008, and has been contributing oral histories and the results of his own research to their database. As part of the efforts to raise awareness of Wiradjuri language a Grammar of Wiradjuri language was published in 2014 and A new Wiradjuri dictionary in 2010. The New South Wales Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 became law on 24 October 2017. It

4095-495: The Syntactic Universals proposed by Chomsky and which required a rigid phrase structure was challenged by the syntax of some of the world's languages that had a much less rigid syntax than that of the languages on which Chomsky had based his studies. The concept was invented by Ken Hale who described the syntax of Warlpiri as being non-configurational. However, the first to publish a description of non-configurationality

4186-495: The VP, Baker applies this familiar concept to a new domain, showing that in Mohawk (a polysynthetic language), like English the VP has an obligatory position but NPs can be adjuncts with respect to this element. As discussed above, Baker proposes that in polysynthetic languages NPs do not take the argument position, he hence suggest there is another parameter which forces NPs into the adjoined position. He suggests this licensing occurs as

4277-476: The above generalisations is Kalaw Lagaw Ya , spoken in the Torres Strait Islands , which has an inventory more like its Papuan neighbours than the languages of the Australian mainland, including full voice contrasts: /p b/ , dental /t̪ d̪/ , alveolar /t d/ , the sibilants /s z/ (which have allophonic variation with [tʃ] and [dʒ] respectively) and velar /k ɡ/ , as well as only one rhotic, one lateral and three nasals (labial, dental and velar) in contrast to

4368-419: The approximately 250 once spoken, but with a high rate of attrition as elders died out. Of the 90, 70% by 2001 were judged as 'severely endangered' with only 17 spoken by all age groups, a definition of a 'strong' language. On these grounds it is anticipated that despite efforts at linguistic preservation, many of the remaining languages will disappear within the next generation. The overall trend suggests that in

4459-574: The clusters of properties in non-configurational languages would follow. Eloise Jelinek challenges Hale, providing a re-analysis of Walpiri and certain other non-configurational languages, proposes a different parameter. Mainly Jelinek provides an analysis for why nominals are frequently 'absent' in Warlpiri ( null anaphora ). Following the Government Binding Theory , the projection principle prevents missing nominals, instead there are empty heads that bear relevant thematic roles, in other words

4550-555: The complex verb. The verb carries obligatory polypersonal agreement, a number of derivational affixes (including benefactive, comitative, reflexive/reciprocal and TAM-morphology) and has an impressive potential for incorporation of both nouns and verbs. The Kunwinjku dialect preserved four noun classes but lost the core case marking on the nouns, and a handful of semantic cases are optional. Kune and Manyallaluk Mayali dialects have an optional ergative marker - yih . Nominals have extensive derivational morphology and compounding. Morphology

4641-408: The coronal articulations can be inconsistent. The alveolar series t, n, l (or d, n, l ) is straightforward: across the continent, these sounds are alveolar (that is, pronounced by touching the tongue to the ridge just behind the gum line of the upper teeth) and apical (that is, touching that ridge with the tip of the tongue). This is very similar to English t, d, n, l , though the Australian t

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4732-436: The early stages of language acquisition. The weakening of C INIT , on the other hand, is very unusual. No Australian language has consonant clusters in this position, and those languages with fortis and lenis distinctions do not make such distinctions in this position. Place of articulation distinctions are also less common in this position, and lenitions and deletions are historically common here. While in most languages

4823-480: The encroachment of colonial society broke up Indigenous cultures. For some of these languages, few records exist for vocabulary and grammar. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remained in daily use, with the majority being highly endangered . In 2020, 90 per cent of the barely more than 100 languages still spoken are considered endangered. Thirteen languages are still being transmitted to children. The surviving languages are located in

4914-621: The entire continent. A common feature of many Australian languages is that they display so-called avoidance speech , special speech registers used only in the presence of certain close relatives. These registers share the phonology and grammar of the standard language, but the lexicon is different and usually very restricted. There are also commonly speech taboos during extended periods of mourning or initiation that have led to numerous Aboriginal sign languages . For morphosyntactic alignment , many Australian languages have ergative – absolutive case systems. These are typically split systems;

5005-433: The equivalent of Bininj Gun-wok (Dixon 2002). It also notes that Mayali has also sometimes been used in the same way. Kunwinjku is spoken in the largest population centre, the township of Gunbalanya , and is the most widespread, with an ethnic population of around 900, almost all of whom speak Kunwinjku in spite of increasing exposure to English. Kundjeyhmi is spoken in the central part of Kakadu. As of 2020, only three of

5096-451: The example sentence is as follows: Since the finite VP will have a finite VP constituent does not qualify as a complete subtree, it is not a constituent. What this means based upon the criterion of configurationality is that this dependency structure (like all dependency structures) is non-configurational. The distinction between configurational and non-configurational has hence disappeared entirely, all languages being non-configurational in

5187-520: The first time: Nyandi baaliga Jaingatti. Nyandi mimiga Gumbayynggir. Nya jawgar yaam Gumbyynggir. " (Translation: My father is Dhunghutti. My mother is Gumbayynggir. And, therefore, I am Gumbayynggir.) In the House of Representatives on 31 August 2016 Linda Burney gave an acknowledgment of country in Wiradjuri in her first speech and was sung in by Lynette Riley in Wiradjuri from the public gallery. 2019

5278-463: The framework of non-configurationality, Mark Baker is able to provide basis for the unique syntax seen in polysynthetic languages. Mark Baker's approach to polysythesis creates some debate among linguists as it heavily relies on generative grammar, which causes some languages which would traditionally be considered to be polysynthetic to be excluded. The analysis of non-configurational languages has been controversial among phrase structure grammars . On

5369-459: The hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intelligible varieties) up to possibly 363. The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates , perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and

5460-497: The language, from which the language was reconstructed. "Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership . There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name." Whether it is due to genetic unity or some other factor such as occasional contact, typologically the Australian languages form a language area or Sprachbund , sharing much of their vocabulary and many distinctive phonological features across

5551-558: The language, on the speaker, and on how carefully the speaker pronounces the sound. These are interdental with the tip of the tongue visible between the teeth, as in th in English; dental with the tip of the tongue down behind the lower teeth, so that the blade is visible between the teeth; and denti-alveolar , that is, with both the tip and the blade making contact with the back of the upper teeth and alveolar ridge, as in French t, d, n, l . The first tends to be used in careful enunciation, and

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5642-443: The languages of central Arnhem Land (and contrasts with most other Australian languages ) in having a phonemic glottal stop, two stop series (short and long), five vowels without a length contrast, relatively complex consonant clusters in codas (though only single-consonant onsets) and no essential distinction between word and syllable phonotactics. The consonant and vowel tables include the standardized pan-dialectal orthography. This

5733-487: The last in more rapid speech, while the tongue-down articulation is less common. Finally, the palatal series ty, ny, ly . (The stop is often spelled dj , tj , or j .) Here the contact is also laminal, but further back, spanning the alveolar to postalveolar, or the postalveolar to prepalatal regions. The tip of the tongue is typically down behind the lower teeth. This is similar to the "closed" articulation of Circassian fricatives (see Postalveolar consonant ). The body of

5824-467: The mainland at the end of the Quaternary glaciation , and Indigenous Tasmanians remained isolated from the outside world for around 12,000 years. Claire Bowern has concluded in a recent study that there were twelve Tasmanian languages, and that those languages are unrelated (that is, not demonstrably related) to those on the Australian mainland. In 1990 it was estimated that 90 languages still survived of

5915-436: The most appropriate unit to describe the phonotactics of Australian languages is the phonological word. The most common word length is two syllables , and a typical phonological word would have the form: (C INIT )V 1 C 1 (C 2 )V 2 (C FIN ) with the first syllable being stressed. The optionality of C FIN is cross-linguistically normal, since coda consonants are weak or nonexistent in many languages, as well as in

6006-780: The most isolated areas. Of the five least endangered Western Australian Aboriginal languages, four belong to the Western Desert grouping of the Central and Great Victoria Desert . Yolŋu languages from north-east Arnhem Land are also currently learned by children. Bilingual education is being used successfully in some communities. Seven of the most widely spoken Australian languages, such as Warlpiri , Murrinh-patha and Tiwi , retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers. Some Indigenous communities and linguists show support for learning programmes either for language revival proper or for only "post-vernacular maintenance" (Indigenous communities having

6097-414: The nominal is recoverable. Hale stipulates that nominals in non-configurational languages are simply optional, which is a result of the nature of the relationship between phrase structure and lexical structure in non-configurational languages. However Jelinek proposes configurationally parameters that are in agreement with the projection principle, with specific reference to Warlpiri data. It is proposed that

6188-544: The not too distant future all of the Indigenous languages will be lost, perhaps by 2050, and with them the cultural knowledge they convey. During the period of the Stolen Generations , Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in institutions where they were punished for speaking their Indigenous language. Different, mutually unintelligible language groups were often mixed together, with Australian Aboriginal English or Australian Kriol language as

6279-843: The one hand, much work on these languages in Principles and Parameters has attempted to show that they are in fact configurational. On the other hand, it has been argued in Lexical Functional Grammar that these attempts are flawed, and that truly non-configurational languages exist. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the existence of non-configurational languages bears on the question of whether grammatical functions like subject and object are independent of structure. If they are not, no language can be truly non-configurational. The distinction between configurational and non-configurational languages can exist for phrase structure grammars only. Dependency grammars (DGs), since they lack

6370-433: The only lingua franca . The result was a disruption to the inter-generational transmission of these languages that severely impacted their future use. Today, that same transmission of language between parents and grandparents to their children is a key mechanism for reversing language shift. For children, proficiency in the language of their cultural heritage has a positive influence on their ethnic identity formation, and it

6461-480: The opportunity to learn some words and concepts related to the lost language). The National Indigenous Languages Survey is a regular Australia-wide survey of the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages conducted in 2005, 2014 and 2019. Languages with more than 100 speakers: Total 46 languages, 42,300 speakers, with 11 having only approximately 100. 11 languages have over 1,000 speakers. Most Australian languages are commonly held to belong to

6552-558: The past, however Bininj Kunwok is the current standard orthography. The Aboriginal people who speak the dialects are the Bininj people, who live primarily in western Arnhem Land . There are over two thousand fluent speakers in an area roughly bounded by Kakadu National Park to the west, the Arafura Sea to the north, the Blyth River to the east, and the Katherine region to the south. As

6643-402: The position of NPs, the licensing of NPs and discontinuous constituents. In non-configurational languages any NP can be omitted and can appear in an order relative to the verb or other NPs. Baker proposes polysynthetic languages follow this structure as NPs appear to have the properties of adjuncts. To take an example of an English parallel, adverbs are modifiers and can appear on either side of

6734-551: The preceding stem contains a nasal consonant. While the existence of phonemic pre-stopped nasals and laterals, contrasting with plain nasals and laterals, has been documented in some Australian languages, nasals and laterals are pre-stopped on a phonetic level in most languages of the continent. These phenomena are the result of a general resistance to the anticipatory assimilation of nasality and laterality. The lack of assimilation makes coda nasals and laterals more acoustically distinct. Most speakers of Australian languages speak with

6825-478: The probable number of languages and the estimate of pre-contact population levels that there may have been from 3,000 to 4,000 speakers on average for each of the 250 languages. A number of these languages were almost immediately wiped out within decades of colonisation, the case of the Aboriginal Tasmanians being one notorious example of precipitous linguistic ethnocide . Tasmania had been separated from

6916-570: The proto-Northern-and-Middle Pamic (pNMP) family of the Cape York Peninsula on the Australian northeast coast and proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) apart, to support the Pama–Nyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that of Proto-Indo-European . Johanna Nichols suggests that the northern families may be relatively recent arrivals from Maritime Southeast Asia , perhaps later replaced there by

7007-505: The relatively unconstrained manner in which words are ordered within the sentence is due to the way in which the projection principle acts in non-configurational languages. Hale's Configurationality Parameter (CP) holds that, in non-configurational languages, the projection principle holds of only lexical structure (LS). This is in contrast to configurational languages, where CP states that the projection principle holds of both phrasal structure (PS) and lexical structure. According to Hale, it

7098-403: The relevant sense. Note, however, that while the finite VP is not a constituent in the tree, the non-finite VP have a finite VP constituent is a constituent (because it qualifies as a complete subtree). Dependency grammars point to the results of standard constituency tests as evidence that finite VP does not exist as a constituent While these tests deliver clear evidence for the existence of

7189-404: The remainder are classified as "non-Pama–Nyungan", which is a term of convenience that does not imply a genealogical relationship. In the late 18th century there were more than 250 distinct First Nations Peoples social groupings and a similar number of languages or varieties . The status and knowledge of Aboriginal languages today varies greatly. Many languages became extinct with settlement as

7280-785: The same time, Australian languages make full use of those distinctions, namely place of articulation distinctions, which people with otitis media-caused hearing loss can perceive more easily. This hypothesis has been challenged on historical, comparative, statistical, and medical grounds. A language which displays the full range of stops, nasals and laterals is Kalkatungu , which has labial p, m ; "dental" th, nh, lh ; "alveolar" t, n, l ; "retroflex" rt, rn, rl ; "palatal" ty, ny, ly ; and velar k, ng . Wangganguru has all this, as well as three rhotics. Yanyuwa has even more contrasts, with an additional true dorso-palatal series, plus prenasalised consonants at all seven places of articulation, in addition to all four laterals. A notable exception to

7371-464: The sentence to be grammatical in Warlpiri. In English, the DP "I" is the argument and the adjective "short" is the argument-taking predicate. The trees to the right show the differences between configurational and non-configurational languages, with an example tree from Warlpiri compared with an example tree from English. Hale (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983) aimed to define a configurationality parameter from which

7462-409: The spread of Austronesian . That could explain the typological difference between Pama–Nyungan and non-Pama–Nyungan languages, but not how a single family came to be so widespread. Nicholas Evans suggests that the Pama–Nyungan family spread along with the now-dominant Aboriginal culture that includes the Australian Aboriginal kinship system. In late 2017, Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer published

7553-562: The subject is the argument that appears outside of the VP, but the object appears inside it. The flat structure on the right, where there is no VP, forces/allows one to view aspects of syntax differently. More generally, Hale proposed that non-configurational languages have the following characteristics: However, it is not clear that those properties all cluster together. Languages that have been described as non-configurational include Mohawk , Warlpiri , Nahuatl , O'odham (Papago), Jingulu , and Jiwarli . Using non-configurationality as

7644-464: The subject of a concerted revival movement since the 1980s, coordinated by Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi , a unit working out of the University of Adelaide . The language had rapidly disappeared after the settlement of South Australia and the breaking up of local indigenous people. Ivaritji, the last known speaker of the language, died in 1931. However, a substantial number of primary source records existed for

7735-410: The subject of a sentence is outside the finite verb phrase (VP) (directly under S below) but the object is inside it. Since there is no VP constituent in non-configurational languages, there is no structural difference between subject and object. The distinction — configurational versus non-configurational — can exist in phrase structure grammars only. In a dependency-based grammar , the distinction

7826-497: The tongue is raised towards the palate . This is similar to the "domed" English postalveolar fricative sh . Because the tongue is "peeled" from the roof of the mouth from back to front during the release of these stops, there is a fair amount of frication, giving the ty something of the impression of the English palato-alveolar affricate ch or the Polish alveolo-palatal affricate ć . That is, these consonants are not palatal in

7917-420: The word-initial position is prominent, maintaining all a language's contrasts, that is not the case in Australia. Here the prominent position is C 1 (C 2 ), in the middle of the word. C 1 is typically the only position allowing all of a language's place of articulation contrasts. Fortis/lenis contrasts can only occur at C 1 , or at C 2 when C 1 is a sonorant. Consonant clusters are often restricted to

8008-415: The world. In Australia, this type of assimilation seems only to have affected consonants within the apical and laminal categories. There's little evidence of assimilation between the labial, apical, laminal, and dorsal categories. Many proto-Pama–Nyungan /-np-/ and /-nk-/ clusters have been preserved across Australia. Heterorganic nasal + stop sequences remain stable even in modern connected speech, which

8099-538: Was Chomsky himself in his 1981 lectures on Government and Binding , in which he referred to an unpublished paper by Hale. Chomsky made it a goal of the Government and Binding framework to accommodate languages such as Japanese and Warlpiri that apparently did not conform to his proposed language universal of Move α . Hale later published his own description of non-configurationality in Warlpiri. Non-configurational languages contrast with configurational languages, where

8190-543: Was the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019), as declared by the United Nations General Assembly . The commemoration was used to raise awareness of and support for the preservation of Aboriginal languages within Australia, including spreading knowledge about the importance of each language to the identity and knowledge of Indigenous groups. Warrgamay/Girramay man Troy Wyles-Whelan joined

8281-623: Was the first legislation in Australia to acknowledge the significance of first languages. In 2019 the Royal Australian Mint issued a 50-cent coin to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages which features 14 different words for "money" from Australian Indigenous languages. The coin was designed by Aleksandra Stokic in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups. The work of digitising and transcribing many word lists created by ethnographer Daisy Bates in

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