Documentation and Description of Wanyjirra, a language of Northern Australia

Language	Wanyjirra
Depositor	Chikako Senge
Affiliation	Australian National University
Location	Australia
Collection ID	0125
Grant ID	IGS0079
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/fdc54ea7-b1f6-42af-afc3-3cb6a88fe617

 

Summary of the collection

Wanyjirra (ISO 639:gue) is a little-known and endangered Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the Northern Australia. At least two fluent speakers currently live in Halls Creek, Western Australia (located in -18.233/127.667). This project aimed to describe and document Wanyjirra mainly working with two speakers and their families.

 

Language information

Wanyjirra is an Australian language of the Ngumpin-Yapa group of the Pama-Nyungan family. There are two fluent Wanyjirra speakers who live in the town of Halls Creek, Western Australia. At the time of the field work in 2009, both were over 80 years old. Their descendents and other community members did not have a full command of Wanyjirra. Although they partially understood Wanyjirra, they did not speak it in their daily lives. Nonetheless, traditional practices of asymmetric multilingualism meant that they participate in conversations where older speakers addressed them in Wanyjirra and they replied in Kriol and/or Jaru. Given this situation, it was clear that Wanyjirra was in urgent need of documentation and description, in a way that drew together the speaking competence of the oldest speakers and the passive competence of the younger members of the community.

 

Special characteristics

Since Wanyjirra is lexically similar to surrounding languages, it has been treated as a dialect of these languages and has been missed on some surveys or language maps. For example, according to Ethnologue, Wanyjirra is erroneously reported as a dialect of Gurindji. However, recorded material which Prof. Tsunoda has provided show uniqueness of the Wanyjirra language and culture. For example, Wanyjirra people retain an ‘avoidance’ speech style which is used instead of ordinary speech style between specific taboo kin relations and their own marriage rules based on subsection systems. Another example is the Wanyjirra free pronoun system. This seems to lack core case distinctions: a single form is used for intransitive and transitive subject and object (though another form is used for possessor). This property is quite unusual in Pama-Nyungan languages, but strikingly similar to the non-Pama Nyungan languages spoken geographically close to Wanyjirra, which have the same marking pattern. Neutralisations on this scale have not been reported for other Ngumpin-Yapa languages.

Other typological features of special interest in the language include:

1. its vowel system, which has an unusual /e a o/ triangular system as opposed to the more normal /i a u/ system
2. the development of a specific suffix -g- for marking resultative secondary predicates
3. the extension of a special continuous aspect marker which appears to have become the default for most tense values
4. an extensive system for cross-referencing pronominal oblique arguments of various types on the auxiliary
5. the extension of locative-inflected nominalizations to include both same- and different-subject sequences, with the development of a new marker (probably from -rniny ‘way’) for obviative combinations

 

Collection history

Previous fieldwork on Wanyjirra has been carried out by Prof. Tasaku Tsunoda. The depositor’s Postgraduate Diploma Subthesis (completed in 2008) was the first sketch of the grammar of Wanyjirra. However, since the subthesis was based exclusively on the transcribed materials which Prof. Tsunoda provided, many linguistic features and also cultural information including kinship systems and marriage rules needed to be investigated in more detail.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Senge, Chikako. 2011. Documentation and Description of Wanyjirra, a language of Northern Australia. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0002-9B86-5. Accessed on [insert date here].