Badimaya (sometimes written Badimia) 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 ...
. It is a member of the
Kartu subgroup of the
Pama–Nyungan family, spoken by the
Badimaya
The Badimaya people (also written Badimia) are an Aboriginal Australian people from the Mid West region of Western Australia.
Country
Traditional Badimaya country was calculated by Norman Tindale to encompass approximately , and is bordered by ...
people of the
Mid West
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of ...
region of
Western Australia
Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...
.
Badimaya is a critically
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
, spoken by only a handful of elderly Aboriginal people, all of whom are over 65 years of age.
[ However, there is a passionate movement of ]language revival
Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community groups, o ...
underway in the Badimaya community.
Geographic distribution
Badimaya was traditionally spoken across a large region spanning Lake Moore, Ninghan Station, Paynes Find and Dalwallinu in the south, to Mount Magnet
Mount is often used as part of the name of specific mountains, e.g. Mount Everest.
Mount or Mounts may also refer to:
Places
* Mount, Cornwall, a village in Warleggan parish, England
* Mount, Perranzabuloe, a hamlet in Perranzabuloe parish, C ...
, Wynyangoo Station and Kirkalocka Station in the north.
Today Badimaya people live across the Mid West region, based in regional towns and communities including Mount Magnet, Geraldton
Geraldton ( Wajarri: ''Jambinu'', Wilunyu: ''Jambinbirri'') is a coastal city in the Mid West region of the Australian state of Western Australia, north of the state capital, Perth.
At June 2018, Geraldton had an urban population of 37,648. ...
, Yalgoo, Mullewa, Meekatharra, Wubin, Dalwallinu and Perth
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...
.
Traditional Badimaya country is bordered by Western Desert language (Tjuparn, Wanmala) to the east, Noongar
The Noongar (, also spelt Noongah, Nyungar , Nyoongar, Nyoongah, Nyungah, Nyugah, and Yunga ) are Aboriginal Australian peoples who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia, from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the so ...
to the south-west and Wajarri
The Wajarri people, also spelt Wadjari, Wadjarri, Watjarri, and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people whose traditional lands are in the Mid West region of Western Australia.
Boolardy Station, along with the tiny settlement of ...
to the north-west.
Varieties
Analysis of the lexicon and grammatical features of the language suggests that there were (at least) two varieties of Badimaya, a northern and southern variety. These varieties are unnamed; however, Badimaya speakers are aware of differences in the speech of Badimaya people from different regions of Badimaya country.
Widi, also referred to as Wiri (not to be confused with the Wiri language
Biri, also known as Biria, Birri Gubba, Birigaba, Wiri, Perembba and other variants, is an Australian Aboriginal language of the Mackay area of Queensland spoken by the Birri Gubba people. There are at least eight languages regarded as dial ...
of Queensland) and a variety of other names, may be a dialect of Badimaya, but its status is unclear.
Typology
Badimaya is typologically fairly standard of Western Australian Pama-Nyungan languages. It has a phoneme inventory typical of Pama-Nyungan languages, with six places of articulation (showing both a laminal and apical contrast) and a three-way vowel system, with (limited) length-contrast.
Badimaya is a suffixing language with fairly free word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
. It has a split-ergative case marking system, consistent with neighbouring languages. Unlike neighbouring languages however, Badimaya does not show evidence for a bound pronominal system.
Phonology
Consonants
The stops /b/, /g/, /dh/, /dy/, /d/, /rd/ are usually voiced initially and medially, but are voiceless in word final position. In areas further to the south, some speakers were recorded as not voicing any stops at all. In the northern dialect of Badimaya, it is common that word-initial plosives are unvoiced.
The laminal stops /dh/ and /dy/ are very frequently realised intervocalically as fricatives, °ÌªÍ†and ‘respectively (or ¸ÌªÍ† and •respectively if unvoiced). The degree of retroflexion for /rd/, /rn/, and /rl/ differs depending on the preceding vowel, being most extreme following /a/. The alveolar rhotic flap /rr/ is often difficult to distinguish from the alveolar plosive /d/ in regular speech, but the two may be distinguished by their positions in words: /d/ may appear initially, intervocalically, or finally, but /rr/ (as with /r/) only appears intervocalically.
One of the most noticeable phonological features of the data recorded of Badimaya is the consistent use of the retroflex approximant »where, in identical lexical items of neighbouring Pama-Nyungan languages, the alveolar flap ¾is used. It is not known whether this feature is idiosyncratic to Badimaya, or whether it is a case of phonological change due to language death. This is also the case with the modern tendency to realise the palatal plosive /dy/ as an affricate.
Unlike in many neighbouring languages, there is evidence for a dental/palatal contrast in Badimaya. On the basis of data collected, there is no evidence to suggest any patterns of complementary distribution between dental and palatal laminals in relation to front and back vowels, as is the case in Pitjantjatjara
The Pitjantjatjara (; or ) are an Aboriginal people of the Central Australian desert near Uluru. They are closely related to the Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra and their languages are, to a large extent, mutually intelligible (all are vari ...
. There is also no evidence in the data to suggest neutralisation of the laminal contrast word-initially due to the presence of a laminal later in the word, as is the case in Diyari
The Diyari (), alternatively transcribed as Dieri (), is an Indigenous Australian group of the South Australian desert originating in and around the delta of Cooper Creek to the east of Lake Eyre.
Language
Diyari is classified as one of the K ...
.
Vowels
The high front vowel /i/ is realised in every position except word-initially, where it is realised as ª The high back vowel /u/ is expressed typically as Šin non-final position, particularly after peripheral consonants, and is realised elsewhere as It is reduced to ™following primary stress, and when adjacent to a liquid or nasal. The low vowel /a/, by default, experiences the most allophonic variation: after a palatal consonant it is raised to an › Like /u/, it is reduced to ™when following primary stress, and when adjacent to a liquid or nasal. Word-finally, except after palatals, it is rendered Œ- however, in place names ending with "-wa" (e.g. Mullewa), it is ” It is also rendered Œin secondary stress. Following /w/ and preceding sonorants, /a/ is rendered ’
Restrictions on phoneme positions
The vowels /u/ and /a/ do not appear word-initially. The high front vowel /i/ is the only vowel found word-initially, but this can also be analysed as a reduction of /yi/, with an initial consonant.
Constraints on the distribution of consonants are as follows:
* Every Badimaya consonant can appear intervocalically.
* Only peripheral and laminal consonants, with the exclusion of laterals, can appear word-initially. Of the word-initial laminals, the majority are palatal.
* Only nasals, laterals, the stops /d/ and /g/, and the alveolar tap or trill /rr/ can appear word-finally.
The above rules are identical to how they were recorded by Leone Dunn (1988), except for the appearance of /rr/ word-finally, which Dunn did not observe, and may have misidentified when it did occur.
There are two instances of the alveolar lateral /l/ appearing word-initially:
Douglas (1981) lists the word "likarra" as a Badimaya loanword in his collection of Wajarri
The Wajarri people, also spelt Wadjari, Wadjarri, Watjarri, and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people whose traditional lands are in the Mid West region of Western Australia.
Boolardy Station, along with the tiny settlement of ...
terms. This would appear to contradict the Badimaya rule of laterals not appearing word-initially; however, it is also listed as being of Western Desert language origin, and the word (identical phonetically and seemingly semantically) does appear in the language. Thus, this exception can be discounted on the basis of being a loanword from the a Western Desert dialect.
The word "lun.gi" shows an /l/ word-initially, and does not appear to be a loanword.
Grammar
Pronominal system
Pronouns are of the form: person+number+case.[Dunn, Leone. 1988. 'Badimaya, a Western Australian language' pp. 19–49 in ''Papers in Australian Linguistics'' No. 17, Pacific Linguistics, Canberra.] The third person displays person allomorphy
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...
conditioned by number. There are morphological distinctions in the first and second person for the dual number, but this distinction is not found in the third person in the southern dialect. The pronominal forms of the southern dialect of Badimaya are listed below:
There are two demonstrative pronouns a proximal (''nhinha'') and a distal (''banha'') which are declined as follows. The ablative case is formed by adding a suffix to both the ablative ending (-''ngun'') and the word ''gardi'' 'side.'
There are four interrogative proforms, the nominal referring of which have case paradigms for the absolutive, ergative, locative and dative cases. The dative case has a possessive function.
Language resources
The Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre (and previously the Yamaji Language Centre) has been carrying out work on the Badimaya language since 1993. A sketch grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
of Badimaya was published by Leone Dunn in 1988,[ and a Badimaya-]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 ...
dictionary (2014), illustrated topical dictionary (2014) and several children's books were published by Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre. The last fluent speaker of Badimaya, Mt Magnet elder Ollie George, undertook significant language documentation work between the early 1990s and 2018, in collaboration with Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre.
An art and language project, ''Nganang Badimaya Wangga'', was collaboratively produced in 2017 by the Irra Wangga Language Centre, with artists from Yamaji Art and Wirnda Barna Artists. The project produced a book of more than 20 stories of Ollie's life entitled ''Nganang Badimaya Wangga: Yarns with Gami Ollie George'', a short video about Ollie by ABC Open Producer Chris Lewis, and an exhibition of the artworks created for the project.
Notes
References
* Bednall, James (compiler). 2014. 'Badimaya Dictionary: an Aboriginal language of Western Australian'. Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre, Geraldton WA.
* Dunn, Leone. 1988. 'Badimaya, a Western Australian language' pp. 19–49 in ''Papers in Australian Linguistics'' No. 17, Pacific Linguistics, Canberra.
External links
Bibliography of Badimaya language and people resources
at the
{{Pama–Nyungan languages, West
Kartu languages
Endangered indigenous Australian languages in Western Australia
Mid West (Western Australia)