Darkinjung (Darrkinyung; many other spellings; see below) 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 ...

, the traditional language of the

Darkinjung people The Darkinjung (not to be confused with the Darkinyung people further inland) are the Local Aboriginal Land Council in the Central Coast, New South Wales, area of Australia and a major landowner on the Central Coast, participating in formal join ...

. While no audio recordings of the language survive, several researchers have compiled wordlists and grammatical descriptions. It has been classified as a language no longer fully spoken and it can be classified as needing a language renewal program. It was spoken adjacent to

Dharuk The Dharug or Darug people, formerly known as the Broken Bay tribe, are an Aboriginal Australian people, who share strong ties of kinship and, in pre-colonial times, lived as skilled hunters in family groups or clans, scattered throughout much ...

, Wiradhuri, Guringai,

Gamilaraay The Gamilaraay, also known as Gomeroi, Kamilaroi, Kamillaroi and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people whose lands extend from New South Wales to southern Queensland. They form one of the four largest Indigenous nations in Aust ...

, and

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 ...

. The Darkinjung tribe occupied a small part of southeastern Australia inside what is now the New South Wales area. They likely inhabited a considerable tract of land within Hunter, Northumberland, and Cook counties.

Alternate names

The name of the language has various spellings as recorded by both Mathews and W.J. Enright, among others, whom worked off of documentation from the 19th century: Dharag-Neighbors1

* ''Darkinjang'' (Tindale 1974) * ''Darkinjung'' * ''Darkiñung'' (Mathews 1903) * ''Darrkinyung'' * ''Darginjang'' * ''Darginyung'' * ''Darkinung'' * ''Darkinoong'' * ''Darknüng'' * Darkinyung

Revitalisation effort

Since 2003 there has been a movement from the Darkinyung language group to revitalise the language. They started working with the original field reports of Robert H. Mathews and W. J. Enright. Where there were gaps in the sparsely populated wordlists, words were taken from lexically similar nearby languages. This led to the publication of the work ''Darkinyung grammar and dictionary: revitalising a language from historical sources''. This may be ordered from the publisher, Muurrbay Language Centre at http://www.muurrbay.org.au/muurrbay-resources/.

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 ...

Much of our understanding of Darkinjung comes from papers published by R.H. Mathews in 1903. When analyzing these sources, we may generalize that there were around 15 consonants phonemes, and approximately 3 vowels.

Consonants

In Darkinjung, like many Australian languages, b, d, and g are interchangeable with p, t, and k and will not change the meaning of the word. The fact that this table shows b, d, and g is arbitrary.

Vowels

Morphology

"Tags"

Darkinjung makes use of what Mathews refers to as "tags," or suffixes to denote relationships between objects in sentences. Number tags -bula "two" and -biyn "several" : Possessor Tag: -gayi : 'a man's boomerang' Locative "at, on, in" tags: -a/ -da/ -dja/ -ga/ -wa :The locative tags -ga and -wa appear to be found after stems ending in vowels. : :'on the other side' Words with locational information seem to coincide with nouns that also carry a locative tag: : :'around the house, hidden' Ergative case tags: -a/ -da/ -ga/ -ya. Words that end in the consonant ŋ receive that tag /-ga/ : :'the woman caught a perch'

References

Additional References

External links

Bibliography of Darkinjung people and language resources
at the

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), established as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1964, is an independent Australian Government statutory authority. It is a collecting, ...

{{Pama–Nyungan languages, East Extinct languages Yuin–Kuric languages