The Warumungu (or ''Warramunga'') language is spoken by the Warumungu people in Australia's

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 ...

. In addition to spoken language, the Warumungu have a highly developed

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign ...

Classification

The Warumungu language is a Pama–Nyungan language similar to the

Warlpiri language The Warlpiri ( or ) ( wbp, Warlpiri > waɭbɪ̆ˌɻi language is spoken by about 3,000 of the Warlpiri people from the Tanami Desert, northwest of Alice Springs, Central Australia. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Pama–N ...

spoken by the

Warlpiri people The Warlpiri, sometimes referred to as Yapa, are a group of Aboriginal Australians defined by their Warlpiri language, although not all still speak it. There are 5,000–6,000 Warlpiri, living mostly in a few towns and settlements scattered th ...

History

In the 1870s, early white explorers described the Warumungu as a flourishing

nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by th ...

.The Warumungu: ''The Land is Always Alive''
Retrieved 23 December 2008 However, by 1915, invasion and

reprisal A reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Since the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (AP 1), reprisals in the laws of war are extreme ...

had brought them to the brink of

starvation Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake, below the level needed to maintain an organism's life. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage and eventually, de ...

.Blackwell-Reference Online: Warumungu (Australian: Pama–Nyungan)
Retrieved 23 December 2008 In 1934, a reserve that had been set aside for the Warumungu in 1892 was revoked in order to clear the way for

gold prospecting Gold prospecting is the act of searching for new gold deposits. Methods used vary with the type of deposit sought and the resources of the prospector. Although traditionally a commercial activity, in some developed countries placer gold prosp ...

. By the 1960s, the Warumungu had been entirely removed from their native land.

Current status

Warumungu is classified as a living language, but its number of speakers seemed to be decreasing quickly. In the mid-1950s, Australian linguist Robert Hoogenraad estimated that there were only about 700 people who could speak some Warumungu;Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project: Warumungu
Retrieved 22 December 2008 by 1983, the population was estimated to be as small as 200 speakers.Ethnologue report for language code:wrm
" in Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'', Fifteenth edition
Dallas, Tex.:

SIL International SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to e ...

. However, the language has evidently undergone something of a renaissance. Today, the language is in a robust position compared to many indigenous Australian languages, as it is being acquired by children and used in daily interaction by all generations, and the situation is sustainable though some ethnic group members may prefer Kriol.

Syntax and morphology

Warumungu is a suffixing language, in which

verbs A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descrip ...

are formed by adding a tense

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...

(although some verbs are formed by

compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...

preverb Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian (including all three families: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian and Kartvelian), Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elem ...

). As are many of the surviving

Indigenous 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 ...

, the Warumungu language is undergoing rapid change. The morphology used by younger speakers differs significantly than the one used by older speakers. An example of a Warumungu sentence might be , meaning 'father's mother, is she there, in town, or not?'.Scholar Sceptic: Australian Aboriginal Studies
Retrieved 23 December 2008

External links

* Paradisec ha
a number of collections that include Warumungu language materials.

References

{{Australian Aboriginal languages Pama–Nyungan languages Languages of Australia