Bininj Kunwok is an
Australian Aboriginal language which includes six dialects: Kunwinjku (formerly Gunwinggu), Kuninjku, Kundjeyhmi (formerly Gundjeihmi), Manyallaluk Mayali (Mayali), Kundedjnjenghmi, and two varieties of Kune (Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek). Kunwinjku is the dominant dialect, and also sometimes used to refer to the group. The spellings Bininj Gun-wok and Bininj Kun-Wok have also been used in the past, however Bininj Kunwok is the current standard orthography.
The
Aboriginal people
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
who speak the dialects are the
Bininj
The Bininj are an Aboriginal Australian people of Western Arnhem land in the Northern Territory. The sub-groups of Bininj are sometimes referred to by the various language dialects spoken in the region, that is, the group of dialects known as Bi ...
people, who live primarily in western
Arnhem Land. There are over two thousand fluent speakers in an area roughly bounded by
Kakadu National Park
Kakadu National Park is a protected area in the Northern Territory of Australia, southeast of Darwin. It is a World Heritage Site. Kakadu is also gazetted as a locality, covering the same area as the national park, with 313 people recorded liv ...
to the west, the
Arafura Sea
The Arafura Sea (or Arafuru Sea) lies west of the Pacific Ocean, overlying the continental shelf between Australia and Western New Guinea (also called Papua), which is the Indonesian part of the Island of New Guinea.
Geography
The Arafura S ...
to the north, the
Blyth River Blyth may refer to:
People
* Blyth (surname)
* Blythe (given name)
Places Australia
* Blyth, South Australia, a small town
Canada
* Blyth, Ontario, a village
United Kingdom
* Blyth, Northumberland, a town
** Blyth Valley (UK Parliament cons ...
to the east, and the
Katherine
Katherine, also spelled Catherine, and other variations are feminine names. They are popular in Christian countries because of their derivation from the name of one of the first Christian saints, Catherine of Alexandria.
In the early Christ ...
region to the south.
Dialects and naming
Evans (2003), who introduced the cover term ''Bininj Gun-wok'' for all dialects, identifies six dialects: Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Gundjeihmi (now Kundjeyhmi
[), Manyallaluk Mayali, Kundedjnjenghmi, and two varieties of Kune most commonly known as Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek; based on the fact that
* the phonology, grammar and lexicon of these dialects share significant clusterings of properties
* these distinctions are recognised, at least by the relevant group and its neighbours, by the use of distinct language names.
, AUSTLANG, under the title "N186: Bininj Gun-Wok / Bininj Kunwok", cites Evans' grouping, but adds that others have used Kunwinjku as the equivalent of Bininj Gun-wok (Dixon 2002). It also notes that Mayali has also sometimes been used in the same way.]
In the 2021 Australian census, 1,494 people reported as being Kunwinjku language speakers, as well as 423 Kuninjku speakers, 257 of Kune, 71 of Mayali and 12 of Gundjeihmi (Kundjeyhmi), totalling 2,257 speakers. Kundedjnjenghmi was not offered as an option according to the Australian Standard Classification of Languages (ASCL).
Kunwinjku is spoken in the largest population centre, the township of Gunbalanya
Gunbalanya (also spelt Kunbarlanja, and historically referred to as Oenpelli) is an Aboriginal Australian town in west Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia, about east of Darwin. The main language spoken in the community is Kunwi ...
, and is the most widespread, with an ethnic population of around 900, almost all of whom speak Kunwinjku in spite of increasing exposure to English. Kundjeyhmi is spoken in the central part of Kakadu.
, only three of the 12 original languages spoken in the Kakadu area are regularly spoken: Kundjeyhmi, Kunwinjku and Jawoyn
The Jawoyn, also written Djauan, are an Australian Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory of Australia. The Bagala clan are of the Jawoyn people.
Language
Jawoyn, known as Kumertuo, is a non- Pama–Nyungan language that belongs ...
. Kundjeyhmi and Kunwinjku are dialects of Bininj Kunwok, while Jawoyn is a separate language spoken in the southern areas.
As of June 2015, the Gundjeihmi dialect group officially adopted standard Kunwinjku orthography, meaning it would in future be spelt ''Kundjeyhmi''.
Phonology
Bininj Kunwok is typical of the languages of central Arnhem Land (and contrasts with most other 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 ...
) in having a phonemic glottal stop, two stop series (short and long), five vowels without a length contrast, relatively complex consonant clusters in codas (though only single-consonant onsets) and no essential distinction between word and syllable phonotactics.
Consonant inventory
Vowel inventory
This is an abnormal vowel inventory for one of the Australian Aboriginal languages, as most of them simply have a three-vowel /i/, /u/, /a/ system with length distinctions. Bininj Kunwok is unique in that it does not have length distinctions for vowels (despite having them for consonants), and has the mid vowels /e/ and /o/ as well as the usual three.
Grammar
Bininj Kunwok is polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...
, with grammatical relations largely encoded within the complex verb. The verb carries obligatory polypersonal agreement, a number of derivational affixes (including benefactive, comitative, reflexive/reciprocal and TAM-morphology) and has an impressive potential for incorporation of both nouns and verbs.
The Kunwinjku dialect preserved four noun classes but lost the core case marking on the nouns, and a handful of semantic cases are optional. Kune and Manyallaluk Mayali dialects have an optional ergative marker -''yih''. Nominals have extensive derivational morphology and compounding.
Morphology
Morphology is mainly agglutinating
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...
, with fusion zones at the edges of the word.
Syntax
Bininj Kunwok shows syntactic patterns characteristic of 'non-configurational' languages: nominal modifiers can appear without the N head (typical of many 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 ...
), there is no rigid order within the 'nominal group', and the distinction between predicative and argumental use of nominals is hard to make.
References
Further reading
*
*
* , 2 volumes
*
External links
Bininj Kunwok online dictionary
Kunwok
Bibliography of Gundjeihmi people and language resources
at AIATSIS
Bibliography of Kune people and language resources
at AIATSIS
*
*
{{Australian Aboriginal languages
Gunwinyguan languages
Arnhem Land
Indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory