Wambaya language

Wambaya is a Non-Pama-Nyungan West Barkly Australian language of the Mirndi language group[4] that is spoken in the Barkly Tableland of the Northern Territory, Australia.[5] Wambaya and the other members of the West Barkly languages are somewhat unusual in that they are suffixing languages, unlike most Non-Pama-Nyungan languages which are prefixing.[4]

Wambaya
McArthur River
Native toAustralia
RegionBarkly Tableland, Northern Territory
EthnicityWambaya, Gudanji, Binbinga
Native speakers
61 (2016 census)[1]
Dialects
  • Wambaya
  • Gudanji
  • Binbinka
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
wmb – Wambaya
nji – Gudanji
Glottologwamb1258
AIATSIS[2]C19 Wambaya, C26 Gurdanji, N138 Binbinga
ELPWambaya[3]

The language was reported to have 12 speakers in 1981, and some reports indicate that the language went extinct as a first language.[6] However, in the 2011 Australian census 56 people stated that they speak Wambaya at home.[7] That number increased to 61 in the 2016 Census.[8]

Rachel Nordlinger notes that the speech of the Wambaya, Gudanji and Binbinka people "are clearly dialects" of a single language, which she calls "McArthur", while Ngarnga is closely related but is "probably best considered a language of its own".[9]

References
  1. "Census 2016, Language spoken at home by Sex (SA2+)". stat.data.abs.gov.au. ABS. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
  2. C19 Wambaya at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies  (see the info box for additional links)
  3. Endangered Languages Project data for Wambaya.
  4. Nordlinger, Rachel. (1998), A Grammar Of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia), p. 1.
  5. Ethnologue
  6. Bender, Emily M. (2008), Evaluating a Crosslinguistic Grammar Resource: A Case Study of Wambaya, p. 2
  7. http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/SSC70177?opendocument&navpos=220
  8. "2016 Census: Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples QuickStats - Tennant Creek". www.censusdata.abs.gov.au. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  9. Nordlinger, Rachel (1998). A Grammar of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia) (PDF). Pacific Linguistics. p. 2–3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.