Mingginda or Minkin is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language, perhaps a language isolate, of northern Australia. It was spoken by the

Mingin people The Mingin, also known as the Mingginda, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Queensland, who lived in the Gulf Country east of Moonlight Creek and the Yukulta / Ganggalidda people in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Language ...

in the area around

Burketown Burketown is an isolated outback town and coastal locality in the Shire of Burke, Queensland, Australia. In the , the locality of Burketown had a population of 238 people. It is located west of Cairns and west of Normanton on the Albert R ...

, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in an area that contains the headwaters of the

Leichhardt River The Leichhardt River is a river in north west Queensland, Australia. Course The source of the river is in the Selwyn Range under Rifle Creek Hill and fed by Rifle Creek approximately south of the mining town Mount Isa. It runs in a generally n ...

. 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 or Tankic

language families 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 hi ...

. 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 Bowern (2011).Bowern, Claire. 2011.
How Many Languages Were Spoken in Australia?
, ''Anggarrgoon: Australian languages on the web'', December 23, 2011
corrected
February 6, 2012)

Vocabulary

Minkin data reconstituted by

Evans Evans may refer to: People *Evans (surname) *List of people with surname Evans Places United States *Evans Island, an island of Alaska *Evans, Colorado *Evans, Georgia *Evans County, Georgia *Evans, New York *Evans Mills, New York *Evans City, ...

(1990): :

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Minkin Language Tangkic languages Extinct languages of Queensland Language isolates of Australia