Maung (Mawung, Mawng, Gun-marung) is an Australian aboriginal language spoken by the

Maung people The Maung people, or Warruwi, are an Aboriginal Australian people living on the Goulburn Islands, in the Arafura sea off the coast of the Northern Territory. Language Maung language, Maung is not one of the majority Pama-Nyungan languages, but b ...

on the

Goulburn Islands The Goulburn Islands are a group of small islands and islets in the Arafura Sea off the coast of Arnhem Land in Northern Territory of Australia. The largest islands are Weyirra (North Goulburn Island) and Warruwi (South Goulburn Island), where t ...

, off the north coast of Arnhem Land, in the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Aust ...

of Australia. Maung is closely related to

Iwaidja language Iwaidja, in phonemic spelling ''Iwaja'', is an Australian aboriginal language of the Iwaidja people with about 123 native, with an extra 20 to 30 L2 speakers in northernmost Australia. Historically having come from the base of the Cobourg Penin ...

which occupies the northwestern corner of the opposite mainland. This is a language that belongs to the Iwaidjan language family of

Non-Pama–Nyungan 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 ...

.Capell, A. & Hinch, H. E. 1970 Maung grammar; texts and vocabulary / A. Capell and H.E. Hinch Mouton, The Hague : As of 2016, there were 370 speakers of the language. Study of Maung has developed to the point where a dictionary, grammar and portions of the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts ...

are available. Maung is taught in local schools alongside

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 ...

and other languages such as Iwaidja or

Kunwinjku The Kunwinjku (formerly written Gunwinggu) people are an Australian Aboriginal people, one of several groups within the Bininj people, who live around West Arnhem Land to the east of Darwin, Northern Territory. Kunwinjku people generally refer t ...

. Children are still acquiring it as a

first language A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...

, making it somewhat healthier than most other aboriginal languages.

Phonology

The phonemic inventories provided here are from Capell's well-known 1970 work on Maung. More recent papers (Singer 2006; Singer, R. 2006 Agreement in Mawng: Productive and lexicalised uses of agreement in an Australian language: The University of Melbourne Melbourne : Teo 2007 Teo, A. 2007 Breaking up is hard to do: teasing apart morphological complexity in Iwaidja and Maung:) have only two rhotics to Capell's three. Teo lacks the alveolar flap, and Singer the retroflex flap. (In a minor difference, both describe the approximant as retroflex, whereas Capell describes it as alveolar.)

Grammar

Maung has five

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

s: masculine, feminine, vegetation, land, and edible.

Alternative names

* ''Kunmarung'' (

exonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

References

{{Australian Aboriginal languages Iwaidjan languages