The Languages Of The Kimberley Western Australia

The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their mother tongue and usual language of communication. This book describes the Aboriginal languages spoken today and in the recent past in this region.

Gives location, variant spelling, classification, linguistic situation, research and bibliographic information for all languages in regions south of Kimberleys; notes on Aboriginal English and Kriol; extensive annotated bibliography; indexes to variant language spellings, and to linguists.

Background information, comparison with neighbouring languages, previous works; phonology, work classes, syntax, morphology, avoidance language; texts.

The Kimberley Arafuran language Worrorra was spoken traditionally on the remote coastline and precipitously beautiful hinterland between the Walcott Inlet and the Prince Regent River. The language described here is that attested by its last full speakers, Patsy Lulpunda, Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah. Patsy Lulpunda was a child when Europeans first entered her country in 1912, and Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah both grew up on the Kunmunya mission. This comprehensive and detailed grammar provides as well an historical and cultural context for a society now drastically altered. In the 1950s Worrorra people left their traditional land and from the 1970s the number of people speaking Worrorra as their first language declined dramatically. Worrorra is a highly polysynthetic language, characterised by overarching concord and a high degree of morphological fusion. Verbal semantics involve a voicing opposition and an extensive system of evidentiality-marking. Worrorra has elaborate systems of pragmatic reference, a derivational morphology that projects agreement-class concord across most lexical categories and complex predicates that incorporate one verb within another. Nouns are distributed among five genders, the intensional properties of which define dynamic oppositions between men and women on the one hand, and earth and sky on the other. This volume will be of interest to morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, anthropologists, typologists, and readers interested in Australian language and culture generally.

Macquarie Aboriginal Words is a dictionary of words from a selection of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. This ebook covers the languages of Nyungar, Gooniyandi, and Yindjibarndi from Western Australia. For each language, the following information is provided: · a brief history of the language · points on the grammar, spelling and pronunciation · an extensive wordlist organised by categories, such as animals, body parts, kin relationships, placenames, etc. · a dual index, i.e. English to Language and Language to English This ebook series is based on Macquarie Aboriginal Words originally published in print in 1994. The sheer diversity of indigenous languages in Australia must be close to the greatest and richest component of this country's national cultural heritage ... This book is much needed, as it gives a sense of the richness of a heritage which is disappearing in many areas of the country. NOEL PEARSON