62-618: Macumba River ( Arabana : Maka-Wimpa ; Arrernte : Ura-Ingka ), once known as Treuer River , is an ephemeral freshwater stream in the far north of South Australia , that is part of the Lake Eyre Basin . The river rises at the base of Macumba Hill and where the Alberga River joins with Hamilton and Currallulla creeks, it then flows in a south easterly direction entering the Kalamurina Sanctuary and eventually discharges into
124-459: 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
186-696: 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
248-456: 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
310-514: 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
372-657: 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
434-778: 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
496-489: 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
558-529: 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
620-503: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in 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
682-515: 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
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#1732845233347744-654: Is an Australian Aboriginal language of the Pama–Nyungan family , spoken by the Wongkanguru and Arabana people . The language is in steep decline, with an estimated 250 speakers according to 2004 NILS, to just 21 speakers found in the 2006 census. Arabana is spoken at Neales River on the west side of Lake Eyre west to the Stuart Range ; Macumba Creek south to Coward Springs ; at Oodnadatta , Lora Creek , Lake Cadibarrawirracanna , and The Peake . Their boundary with
806-716: Is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Wangkangurru country. It is closely related to Arabana language of South Australia . The Wangkangurru language region was traditionally in the South Australian-Queensland border region taking in Birdsville and extending south towards Innamincka and Lake Eyre , including the local government areas of the Shire of Diamantina as well as the Outback Communities Authority of South Australia . John McDouall Stuart
868-531: 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
930-555: 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
992-541: 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
1054-565: 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
1116-533: 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
1178-626: 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
1240-544: The Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and 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
1302-553: The Kokatha People to their west is marked by the margin of the scarp of the western tableland near Coober Pedy . Arabana has three dialects: Piltapalta, which Hercus refers to as "Arabana Proper", Wangkakupa, and Midhaliri. Wangganguru was also considered a dialect. Most of the nasals and laterals are allophonically prestopped . Arabana has three phonemic vowel sounds as is typical in other Australian languages. This Australian Aboriginal languages -related article
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#17328452333471364-520: 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
1426-683: The Warburton River near the north eastern side of Lake Eyre . The Macumba is situated in an arid region, the Simpson Desert and flows only very rarely. Even in years that Lake Eyre fills, such as 2010, most of the water comes from the east, the Channel Country of Queensland . The Finke River normally drains into the Simpson Desert to the north west of the Macumba, but in the first decade of
1488-597: The Western Torres Strait language , but 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
1550-429: 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
1612-579: 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
1674-613: The 20th century it is thought that the Finke flowed directly into the Macumba. It is thought that the Finke has flowed to Lake Eyre via the Macumba in 1909, 1938, and 1945. The Macumba is part of the western rivers catchment of the Lake Eyre Drainange basin along with the Peake Creek and Neales River . The western rivers catchment is composed of sandplains, Acacia scrub, gibber plains and dissected residuals. Along with its tributaries
1736-514: 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
1798-408: 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
1860-534: 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
1922-549: 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
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1984-476: 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
2046-419: 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
2108-719: The area are the Arabana and Arrernte peoples, both of whom belong to the Central Australian Desert language group. The Macumba features in the Emu story , which is told in 80 verses. The Arabana word for the Macumba is Maka-Wimpa which means fire track, the Arrernte word is Ura-Ingka which also means fire track, named so as the river bed would be the path followed by bushfires in the area. Wangkangurru ( also known as Arabana/Wangkangurru, Wangganguru, Wanggangurru, Wongkangurru)
2170-408: 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
2232-436: 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
2294-480: 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
2356-621: 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;
2418-520: 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
2480-497: 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
2542-608: 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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2604-487: 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
2666-467: 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
2728-436: 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
2790-780: 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
2852-544: 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
2914-433: 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
2976-480: 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
3038-551: 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
3100-478: 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
3162-570: 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
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#17328452333473224-437: The river has a catchment area of 39,000 square kilometres (15,058 sq mi). The river passes through a number of permanent and semi-permanent waterholes including Ross waterhole, Walkinna waterhole, Tidnabucca waterhole, Ullabarracoola waterhole and Christmas waterhole. Eleven tributaries join the Macumba including the Alberga River, Stevenson Creek, Coomparana Creek, and Yardaparinna Creek. The traditional owners of
3286-785: 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
3348-472: 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
3410-464: 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
3472-497: 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
3534-446: The widespread Pama–Nyungan family, while 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
3596-420: 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
3658-415: 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
3720-543: 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
3782-786: Was the first European to explore the area in 1859 when he conducted an expedition to the west of Lake Eyre. In 1870, the Australian Overland Telegraph , which crosses the river near Oodnadatta , was being built. In 1984, the Macumba, along with Neales River and the other western tributaries, filled Lake Eyre south and partially filled Lake Eyre north from their discharge following heavy rains in central Australia. The river flooded in both 2011 and 2012 with waters discharging into Lake Eyre each time. 27°49′58″S 137°14′13″E / 27.832645°S 137.237023°E / -27.832645; 137.237023 Arabana language Arabana or Arabuna / ˈ ʌr ə b ʌ n ə /
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#17328452333473844-623: 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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