Maung (Mawung, Mawng, Gun-marung) is an
Australian aboriginal language
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 ...
spoken by the
Maung people on the
Goulburn Islands, off the north coast of
Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land is a historical region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around from the territorial capital, Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin. In 1623, Dutch East India Compa ...
, in 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 ...
of
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
. Maung is closely related to
Iwaidja language 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.
[Capell, A. & Hinch, H. E. 1970 Maung grammar; texts and vocabulary / A. Capell and H.E. Hinch Mouton, The Hague :] As of 2021, there were around 360 speakers of the language.
Study of Maung has developed to the point where a dictionary, grammar and portions of the
Bible
The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...
are available.
Maung is taught in local schools alongside
English and other languages such as
Iwaidja or
Kunwinjku. Children are still acquiring it as a
first language
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period hypothesis, critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' ...
,
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, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...
s: masculine, feminine, vegetation, land, and edible.
Alternative names
* ''Kunmarung'' (
Kunwinjku exonym
An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...
)
References
{{Australian Aboriginal languages
Iwaidjan languages