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Tangkic Languages
The Tangkic languages form a small language family of Australian Aboriginal languages spoken in northern Australia. The Tangkic languages are Lardil (Leerdil) and its special register Damin, Kayardild, and Yukulta (also known as Ganggalida or Nyangga). Of these Lardil is quite divergent, while Yukulta and Kayardild are mutually intelligible. The extinct and poorly attested Minkin language Mingginda or Minkin is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language, perhaps a language isolate, of northern Australia. It was spoken by the Mingin people in the area around Burketown, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in an are ... may have been part of the Tangkic family. Vocabulary Capell (1942) lists the following basic vocabulary items:Capell, Arthur. 1941-1942, 1942-1943Languages of Arnhem Land, North Australia ''Oceania'' 12: 364-392, 13: 24-51. : References {{language families Language families Non-Pama-Nyungan languages Indigenous Australian langu ...
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Gulf Of Carpentaria
The Gulf of Carpentaria (, ) is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the eastern Arafura Sea (the body of water that lies between Australia and New Guinea). The northern boundary is generally defined as a line from Slade Point, Queensland (the northwestern corner of Cape York Peninsula) in the northeast, to Cape Arnhem on the Gove Peninsula, Northern Territory (the easternmost point of Arnhem Land) in the west. At its mouth, the Gulf is wide, and further south, . The north-south length exceeds . It covers a water area of about . The general depth is between and does not exceed . The tidal range in the Gulf of Carpentaria is between . The Gulf and adjacent Sahul Shelf were dry land at the peak of the last ice age 18,000 years ago when global sea level was around below its present position. At that time a large, shallow lake occupied the centre of what is now the Gulf. The Gulf hosts a submerged coral reef pr ...
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Wellesley Islands
The Wellesley Islands, also known as the North Wellesley Islands, is a group of islands off the coast of Far North Queensland, Australia, in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is a locality within the Shire of Mornington local government area. The traditional owners of the islands are the Lardil people. In the , the Wellesley Islands had a population of 1,136 people, all living on the largest island, Mornington Island. Geography The Wellesley Islands, also known as the North Wellesley Islands, is located in the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the eastern (Queensland) side of the gulf. The largest island in the group is Mornington Island, with most people living in the town of Gununa. Two small islands in the group, north of Mornington Island, are designated as the Manowar and Rocky Islands Important Bird Area, because of their importance for breeding seabirds, in particular the brown booby and lesser frigatebird. Other islands in the group include (from north to south): * Moondalbee I ...
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Macro-Pama–Nyungan Languages
Macro-Pama-Nyungan is an umbrella term used to refer to a proposed Indigenous Australian language family. It was coined by the Australian linguist Nicholas Evans in his 1996 book ''Archaeology and linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in global perspective'', co-authored by Patrick McConvell. The term arose from Evans' theory suggesting that two of the largest Indigenous Australian language families share a common origin, and should therefore be classified as a singular language family under "Macro-Pama-Nyungan". The two main families that Evans refers to are the Macro-Gunwinyguan family from Northern Australia, and the most widespread Pama–Nyungan family that spans across mainland and Southern Australia. The different theories regarding Australian linguistic prehistory and Australian language family evolution are widely debated, therefore Macro-Pama-Nyungan is an inconclusive language family classification that is often dissented by linguists in the Aboriginal Australian langu ...
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Lardil Language
Lardil, also spelled Leerdil or Leertil, is a moribund language spoken by the Lardil people on Mornington Island (Kunhanha), in the Wellesley Islands of Queensland in northern Australia. Lardil is unusual among Aboriginal Australian languages in that it features a ceremonial register, called Damin (also Demiin). Damin is regarded by Lardil-speakers as a separate language and has the only phonological system outside Africa to use click consonants.McKnight 1999, 26 Associated languages Lardil is a member of the Tangkic family of Non-Pama–Nyungan Australian languages, along with Kayardild and Yukulta, which are close enough to be mutually intelligible. Though Lardil is not mutually intelligible with either of these, it is likely that many Lardil speakers were historically bilingual in Yangkaal (a close relative of Kayardild), since the Lardil people have long been in contact with the neighboring Yangkaal tribe and trading, marriage and conflict between them seem to have b ...
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Kayardild Language
Kayardild is a moribund Tangkic language spoken by the Kaiadilt on the South Wellesley Islands, north west Queensland, Australia, with fewer than ten fluent speakers remaining. Other members of the family include Yangkaal (spoken by the Yangkaal people), Lardil, and Yukulta The Yukulta people, also spelt Jokula, Jukula, and other variants, and also known as Ganggalidda or Gangalidda, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Queensland. They may be the same as the Yanga group. Country Norman Tindale ( ... (Ganggalidda). It is famous for its many unusual case phenomena, including case stacking of up to four levels, the use of clause-level case to signal interclausal relations and pragmatic factors, and another set of 'verbal case' endings which convert their hosts from nouns into verbs morphologically. Phonology References Bibliography * Further reading * Evans, Nicholas. 1988. Odd topic marking in Kayardild. In Peter Austin, ed., Complex sentence ...
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Yukulta Language
The Yukulta language, also spelt Yugulda, Yokula, Yukala, Jugula, and Jakula, and also known as Ganggalidda (Kangkalita, Ganggalida), is an extinct Tangkic language spoken in Queensland and Northern Territory, Australia. It was spoken by the Yukulta people, whose traditional lands lie on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Nguburinji (Ngubirindi) is regarded as a dialect of the same language, spoken by the Nguburinji people. Classification Yukulta is a member of the Tangkic language group, along with Kayardild, Lardil and Yanggal, all from the North Wellesley Islands and adjoining mainland. The languages are mutually intelligible, and ''tangka'' means "person" in all four languages). These languages were classified as Tangkic by Geoffrey O'Grady, with Carl and Flo Voegelin(1966). Nicholas Evans and Gavan Breen see Yukulta and Nguburinji as dialects of the same language. Nguburinji is known only through a word list by Walter Roth (1897), which shares 90 pe ...
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Minkin Language
Mingginda or Minkin is an extinct language, extinct Australian Aboriginal languages, Australian Aboriginal language, perhaps a language isolate, of northern Australia. It was spoken by the Mingin people in the area around Burketown, Queensland, Burketown, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in an area that contains the headwaters of the Leichhardt River. The classification of Minkin is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of data. It has been suggested that it may have been related to the Yiwaidjan languages, Yiwaidjan or Tankic languages, Tankic language family, language families. Evans (1990) believes it has been demonstrated to be a Tankic language, more distant than the others are to each other; this is accepted in Claire Bowern, Bowern (2011).Bowern, Claire. 2011.How Many Languages Were Spoken in Australia?, ''Anggarrgoon: Australian languages on the web'', December 23, 2011correctedFebruary 6, 2012) Vocabulary Minkin data reconstituted by Nicholas Evans (lingui ...
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Language Family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to '' Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibeta ...
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Australian Aboriginal 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 intelligible varieties) up to possibly 363. The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings. Despite this uncertainty, the Indigenous Australian languages are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages", or the "Australian family". The term can include both Tasmanian languages and the Western Torres Strait language, but the genetic relationship to the mainland Australian languages of the former is unknown, while the latter is Pama–Nyungan, tho ...
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Register (sociolinguistics)
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in ''-ing'' with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g., ''walking'' rather than ''walkin'''), choosing words that are considered more "formal" (such as ''father'' vs. ''dad'' or ''child'' vs. ''kid''), and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as '' ain't'' and '' y'all''. As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties—numerous registers can be identified, with no clear boundaries between them. Discourse categorisation is a complex problem, and even in the general definition of ''register'' given above (language ...
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Damin
Damin ( in the practical orthography of Lardil) was a ceremonial language register used by the advanced initiated men of the aboriginal Lardil ( in the practical orthography) and Yangkaal peoples of northern Australia. Both inhabit islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil on Mornington Island, the largest island of the Wesley Group, and the Yangkaal on the Forsyth Islands. Their languages belong to the same family, the Tangkic languages. Lardil is the most divergent of the Tangkic languages, while the others are mutually comprehensible with Yangkaal. The Lardil word can be translated as ''being silent''. History Origin The origin of Damin is unclear. The Lardil and the Yangkaal say that Damin was created by a mythological figure in Dreamtime. Hale and colleagues believe that it was invented by Lardil elders; it has several aspects found in language games around the world, such as turning nasal occlusives such as ''m'' and ''n'' into nasal clicks, doubling conson ...
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Arthur Capell
Arthur Capell (28 March 1902 – 10 August 1986) was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales in 1902, the only child of Sarah Ann (née Scott) and her husband, Henry Capell. He attended North Sydney Boys' High School. Career Capell graduated from the Sydney Teachers' College in Modern Languages in 1922 and the University of Sydney in the same year as the University medallist in Classics. He taught in high schools for three years at Canterbury Boys' Intermediate High and Tamworth High School. He was then ordained deacon in 1925 and priest in 1926 in the Church of England in Australia. He worked in Newcastle for a decade, as Curate, St Peter's, Hamilton (1926–28); Priest-in-Charge, All Saints, Belmont (1928–29); as a teacher at Broughton School for Boys in Newcastle (1929–32), where he was introduced to the anthropologist ...
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