Ilgar, also known as Garig-Ilgar after its two dialects, is an extinct
Iwaidjan language spoken in the mainland of
Cobourg Peninsula
The Cobourg Peninsula is located east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is deeply indented with coves and bays, covers a land area of about , and is virtually uninhabited with a population ranging from about 20 to 30 in five ...
, around
Port Essington
Port Essington is an inlet and historic site located on the Cobourg Peninsula in the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park in Australia's Northern Territory. It was the site of an early attempt at British settlement, but now exists only as a remote ...
,
Northern Territory
The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory ...
.
Phonology
Consonant inventory
[Evans, Nicholas (1998). "Iwaidja mutation and its origins". In Anna Siewierska & Jae Jung Song. Case, Typology and Grammar: In honor of Barry J. Blake. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 115–149.]
Unlike many Australian languages, Ilgar does not have
lamino-alveolar
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
s.
Vowels
Evans(1998) briefly discusses vowels in his paper noting that Iwaidjan languages including Ilgar have a three vowel ( /a/, /i/, /u/) system typical of most Australian languages.
References
Further reading
*Evans, N. (2007). ''Pseudo-argument affixes in Iwaidja and Ilgar: a case of deponent subject and object agreement''. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, D. Brown, & A. Hippisley (Eds.), Deponency and morphological mismatches (pp. 271–296). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Evans,N. (1994). ''Ilgar Field Notes'', Recorded from Charlie Wardaga.
{{Australian Aboriginal languages
Iwaidjan languages
Languages extinct in the 2000s