Lower Arrernte, also known as Lower Southern Arrernte, Lower Aranda, Lower Southern Aranda and Alenjerntarrpe, is an extinct Arandic language (but not of the

Arrernte language Arrernte or Aranda (; ), or sometimes referred to as Upper Arrernte (Upper Aranda), is a dialect cluster in the Arandic language group spoken in parts of the Northern Territory, Australia, by the Arrernte people. Other spelling variations ar ...

group). Lower Arrernte was spoken in the

Finke River The Finke River, or Larapinta in the Indigenous Arrernte language, is a river in central Australia, whose bed courses through the Northern Territory and the state of South Australia. It is one of the four main rivers of Lake Eyre Basin and is th ...

area, near the Overland Telegraph Line station at Charlotte Waters, just north of the border between

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a States and territories of Australia, state in the southern central part of Australia. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, which in ...

and the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (abbreviated as NT; known formally as the Northern Territory of Australia and informally as the Territory) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian internal territory in the central and central-northern regi ...

, and in the Dalhousie area in S.A. It had been extinct since the last speaker died in 2011, but there is now a

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 group ...

project under way.

Extinction

By 2007 only one person was known to speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation: Brownie Doolan Perrurle (1918–2011), known as Brownie Doolan. Gavan Breen, an Australian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, was able to compile a dictionary of Lower Arrernte comprising about a thousand words by recording talks he had with Doolan.NOTE: Incorrect reporting of years of his two occupations, as 1925 and 1940. Doolan's mother Fanny, father Paddy and grandmother, who lived south of the small settlement at Finke/Aputula in the Northern Territory, near Mt Dare in South Australia, spoke the language. After a stint as a stockman on the Andado station in the mid-1940s, Doolan became a tracker for both Finke and Kulgera police. Doolan and his wife Biddy are recorded in 1960s censuses of Finke, with Brownie recorded as a tracker, and of the Purula group of Aranda people. When Doolan died in 2011, the language was rendered extinct.

Language revival

, Lower Southern Arrernte is one of 20 languages prioritised as part of the Priority Languages Support Project, being undertaken by First Languages Australia and funded by the

Department of Communications and the Arts The Australian Department of Communications and the Arts was a Government department, department of the Government of Australia charged with responsibility for communications policy and programs and cultural affairs. In December 2019, prime mi ...

. The project aims to "identify and document critically-endangered languages — those languages for which little or no documentation exists, where no recordings have previously been made, but where there are living speakers".

References

Arandic languages Endangered indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory {{ia-lang-stub