Awabakal (also Awabagal or the Hunter River – Lake Macquarie, often abbreviated HRLM ) language is an
Australian Aboriginal language
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 intellig ...
that was spoken around
Lake Macquarie
The City of Lake Macquarie is a local government area in Greater Newcastle and part of the Hunter Region in New South Wales, Australia. It was proclaimed a city from 7 September 1984. The area is situated adjacent to the city of Newcastle and is ...
and
Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to:
*Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England
*Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England
*Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...
in
New South Wales
)
, nickname =
, image_map = New South Wales in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of New South Wales in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = Australia
, established_title = Before federation
, es ...
. The name is derived from ''Awaba'', which was the native name of the lake. It was spoken by
Awabakal
The Awabakal people , are those Aboriginal Australians who identify with or are descended from the Awabakal tribe and its clans, Indigenous to the coastal area of what is now known as the Hunter Region of New South Wales. Their traditional te ...
and
Wonnarua
The Wonnarua people, otherwise written Wanarruwa, are a group of Aboriginal Australian people united by strong ties of kinship, and who survived in family groups or clans scattered along the inland area of what is now known as the Hunter Region ...
peoples.
It was studied by missionary
Lancelot Threlkeld
Lancelot Edward Threlkeld (20 October 1788 – 10 October 1859) was an English missionary, primarily based in Australia. He was married twice and survived by sons and daughters from both marriages. Thelkeld is known for his work with Biraban i ...
in the 19th century, who wrote a grammar of the language, but the spoken language had died out before 21st-century
revival efforts.
Classification
Awabakal is a
Pama–Nyungan language, most closely related to the
Worimi language
Worimi (also spelt Warrimay), or Gadjang (also spelt ''Kattang, Kutthung, Gadhang, Gadang, Gathang'') is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is the traditional language of the Worimi people, whose descendants now speak English. Work has starte ...
, within the
Yuin–Kuric group of Pama–Nyungan.
History
![An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/An_Australian_language_as_spoken_by_the_Awabakal.djvu)
Awabakal was studied by the Reverend
Lancelot Threlkeld
Lancelot Edward Threlkeld (20 October 1788 – 10 October 1859) was an English missionary, primarily based in Australia. He was married twice and survived by sons and daughters from both marriages. Thelkeld is known for his work with Biraban i ...
from 1825 until his death in 1859, producing a grammar and dictionary in ''
An Australian Grammar
''An Australian grammar : comprehending the principles and natural rules of the language, as spoken by the Aborigines in the vicinity of Hunter's River, Lake Macquarie, &c. New South Wales'' is a book written by Lancelot Edward Threlkeld and publ ...
'' in 1834.
[Scan1Scan2]
/ref> The speaker of Awabakal who taught him about the language was Biraban
Biraban ( – 14 April 1846) was a leader of the Awabakal people, an Aboriginal Australian people who lived in the area around what is today Lake Macquarie. His native name prior to Awabakal initiation was We-pohng; his naming as Biraban is refe ...
, the tribal leader. Threlkeld and Biraban's ''Specimens of a Dialect of the Aborigines of New South Wales'' in 1827 was the earliest attempt at exhibiting the structure of an Australian language.
Threlkeld's work was greatly expanded by John Fraser John Fraser may refer to:
Politics
*John Simon Frederick Fraser (1765–1803), commanded the Fraser Fencibles in Ireland and was (M.P.) for Inverness-shire
*John James Fraser (1829–1896), 5th Premier of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, 18 ...
and republished in 1892 as '' An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba or Lake Macquarie (near Newcastle, New South Wales) being an account of their language, traditions and customs / by L.E. Threlkeld; re-arranged, condensed and edited with an appendix by John Fraser''.
NLA catalogue entry
It contained a grammar and vocabulary as well as much new material by Fraser, and helped to popularise the name "Awabakal" for the language grouping more broadly referred to as the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language.
Modern revival
The language is currently being revived. A new orthography and reconstruction of the phonology has been undertaken. To date, several publications have been produced including "A grammar for the Awabakal language", "An introduction to the Awabakal language : its orthography, recommended orthoepy and its grammar and stylistics " and "Nupaleyalaan palii Awabakalkoba = Teach yourself Awabakal".
Phonology
Awabakal ceased to be a spoken language since long before the creation of recording equipment, and part of the revival process has been the reconstruction of the phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
. Therefore, the exactness of the language's sounds will never be historically precise. This process has, however, produced one which will be satisfactory for the purpose of revitalisation.
Vowels
Consonants
Grammar
Nouns
There exist three noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
es. The first has 4 declension patterns. A noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
can exist in any of 13 cases.
1st class – Common nouns, descriptors, demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
s and ''minaring'' ('what?').
2nd class – Place names, words of spatial relation
A spatial relationD. M. Mark and M. J. Egenhofer (1994), "Modeling Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions: Combining Formal Mathematical Models and Human Subjects Testing"PDF/ref> specifies how some object is located in space in relation to s ...
s and ''wonta'' ('where?').
3rd class – Persons' names, kinship terms and ''ngaan'' ('who?').
The default, unmarked
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
case of nouns is the absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative– ...
. Unlike English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
and many European languages
Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Rom ...
, in which an unmarked noun is the nominative case
In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...
, and is (in the active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages. A verb ...
) the subject of the sentence, Awabakal merely references a particular noun with this case.
Descriptors
There is a category of words in Awabakal called descriptors. They can stand as referring terms and are in these cases similar to nouns, like adjectives
In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the mai ...
or intransitive verbs/predicative verb-adjective phrases. They can be declined into nominal cases.
Numbers
There are four number words.
*''Wakool'' – one
*''Bulowara'' – two
*''Ngoro'' – three
*''Wara'' – four or five (also the word for the palm of the hand → a handful of)
Pronominal enclitics
Pronominal enclitics
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
are suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
es which have several functions and can be attached to verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
s, descriptors, apposition
Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side so one element identifies the other in a different way. The two elements are said to be ''in apposition'', and one of the elements is c ...
s, interrogatives
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...
, negatives and nouns. The numbers are: singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular homology
* SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS)
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
, dual and plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...
with a feminine/masculine distinction in the first person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...
. They mark verbs for person, number, case and voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...
. The " ergative" enclitcs imply an active transitive situation and the "accusative
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
" implies a passive
Passive may refer to:
* Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive
* Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works
* Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of on ...
intransitive
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
situation. There are three true pronouns which could be called a nominative or topic case. There are only found at the beginning of an independent clause. These pronominals are found in ergative, accusative, dative and possessive cases.
Demonstratives
There are 3 degrees. They are declined for 10 cases.
*'this' near the speaker
*'that' near the addressee(s)
*'that' there (but at hand)
Appositive demonstratives
Here too, there are 3 degrees. These terms indicate place. They decline for 13 cases.
Verbs
The default verbative voice of Awabakal verbs is neutral. I.e. they do not give a sense of active or passive. The pronominal enclitics indicate which voice the verb should be analysed as being in. There are 3 present tenses, 8 future and 7 past, with various voice, aspect and mood modifications.
Example:
Negatives
There are 10 forms of negatives which work with different types of words or phrases.
Conjunctions
Conjunctions are not commonly used in comparison to many languages. Sentences can often be connected without their use. These also have various combinations and case declinations.
Interrogatives
*Ngaan – who?
*Minaring – what?
*Wonta – where?
*Yakowai – how?
*Yakowanta – when?
*Korakowa – why not?
*Wiya – say (how about) ...
Examples
:Wonto ba kauwȧllo mankulla unnoa tara túġunbilliko ġurránto ġéen kinba,
: 2. Yanti bo ġearun kin bara ġukulla, unnoa tara nakillikan kurri-kurri kabiruġ ġatun mankillikan wiyellikanne koba.
: 3. Murrȧrȧġ tia kȧtan yantibo, koito baġ ba tuiġ ko ġirouġ Teopolo murrȧrȧġ ta,
: 4. Gurra-uwil koa bi tuloa, unnoa tara wiyatoara banuġ ba.
::—Introduction of the Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke), or simply Luke (which is also its most common form of abbreviation). tells of the origins, birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Together with the Acts of the Apostles, it makes up a two-volu ...
The Lord's Prayer
Below is the Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ...
in Awabakal, according to the Gospel of Luke. Part of the Gospel of Luke was translated into Awabakal in 1892 and below the text reflects the orthography of the prayer in 1892.
Ġatun noa wiya barun, wiyånůn ba,
ġiakai wiyånůn nura,
Biyuġbai ġearúmba wokka ka ba moroko ka ba kåtan, Kåmůnbilla yitirra ġiroúmba.
Ġurrabunbilla wiyellikanne ġiroúmba,
yanti moroko ka ba, yanti ta purrai ta ba.
Ġuwoa ġearún purreåġ ka takilliko.
Ġatun warekilla ġearúnba yarakai umatoara,
kulla ġéen yanti ta wareka yanti ta wiyapaiyeůn ġearúnba.
Ġatun yuti yikpra ġearún yarakai umullikan kolaġ;
mitomulla ġearún yarakai tabiruġ.
Influence on English
The word ''Koori
Koori (also spelt koorie, goori or goorie) is a demonym for Aboriginal Australians from a region that approximately corresponds to southern New South Wales and Victoria. The word derives from the Indigenous language Awabakal. For some people an ...
'', a self-referential term used by some Aboriginal people, comes from Awabakal.['']Oxford Dictionary of English
The ''Oxford Dictionary of English'' (''ODE'') is a single-volume English dictionary published by Oxford University Press, first published in 1998 as ''The New Oxford Dictionary of English'' (''NODE''). The word "new" was dropped from the titl ...
'', 3rd ed., p 977.
Bibliography
19th century
*Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1827). ''Specimens of a Dialect of the Aborigines of New South Wales; Being the first attempt to form their speech into a written language.''
*
Scan1Scan2
*Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1836). ''An Australian spelling book in the language as spoken by the Aborigines in the vicinity of Hunter's River, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales.''
*Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1850). ''A key to the structure of the Aboriginal language; being an analysis of the particles used as affixes, to form the various modifications of the verbs; shewing the essential powers, abstract roots, and other peculiarities of the language spoken by the Aborigines in the vicinity of Hunter River, Lake Macquarie, etc., New South Wales: together with comparisons of Polynesian and other dialects.''
*Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1858). Language of the Australian Aborigines. ''Waugh's Australian Almanac for the Year 1858.'' 60-80
*
NLA catalogue entry
*Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1892). Fraser, John (ed.), ''An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba or Lake Macquarie (near Newcastle, New South Wales) being an account of their language, traditions and customs.''
21st century
*
*
See also
* Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association
*Indigenous Australian 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 intellig ...
*List of Aboriginal languages of New South Wales
Prior to colonisation in 1788, the Aboriginal Australians living in the areas now known as New South Wales spoke between 35 - 40 languages including between 70 - 100 dialects. Some of these languages are closely related, many are no longer spoken ...
References
*
External links
English-Awabakal dictionary
— Threlkeld's works available online
Bibliography of Awabakal language and people resources
at the
Morning Prayers in the Awabakal Dialect (1835)
digitized by Richard Mammana
{{DEFAULTSORT:Awabakal Language
Worimi languages
Extinct languages of New South Wales
Languages extinct in the 19th century