1. Language Situation

2. Typology

3. References

1. Language Situation <up>

(the following sketch of the phonology and grammar of the language is from the Walmajarri - English Dictionary compiled by Eirlys Richards and Joyce Hudson)

The Walmajarri people traditionally lived in the Great Sandy Desert to the south of the Kimberley.   Subsequent events took them to cattle stations, towns and missions scattered over a wide area.   Today, communities with substantial Walmajarri population are:

Bayulu (Gogo), Bidyadanga (La Grange), Djugerari (Cherrabun), Junjuwa (Fitzroy Crossing), Looma, Millijidee, Mindibungu (Bililuna), Mindi Rardi (Fitzroy Crossing), Mulan (Lake Gregory), Ngumban (Pinnacles), Ngalapita, Ngurtawarta, Wangkajungka (Christmas Creek),Yagga, Yakanarra (Old Cherrabun) - the redrawn boundary now means Yakanarra is located on Gogo, Yungngora (Noonkanbah).

2. Typology <up>

There are seventeen consonants and six vowels, three long and three short. The charts below show how the various sounds are made:

2.1 Walmajarri Consonants

	1 both lips	2 tongue tip behind teeth	3 tongue tip turned back	4 tongue blade on hard palate	5 back of tongue on back of palate
1 air stream completely stopped	p	t	rt	j	k
2 air stream through nose	m	n	rn	ny	ng
3 air stream around sides of tongue		l	rl	ly
4 air stream restricted over centre of tongue		rr
5 air stream unrestricted	w	y	r

2.2 Walmajarri Vowels

		tongue in front of mouth	tongue at centre of mouth	tongue at back of mouth
tongue high in mouth	short long	i ii		u uu
tongue low in mouth	short long		a aa

2.3 Verbal Auxiliary

There is no equivalent in English to the Walmajarri verbal auxiliary. The two purposes of the verbal auxiliary are:

•  to show which person or thing or how many persons or things were involved in the action.   there is no distinction between masculine and feminie so where English distinguishes between he, she and it, Walmajarri does not.

•  to show the mood of the sentence. For instance, if the boy (1 person) does something TO the girl (1 person), the verbal auxiliary has the form pa . If the boy (1 person) does something FOR the girl (1person) the verbal auxiliary is parla . If the boy (1 person) ACCOMPANIES the girl (1 person) the verbal auxiliary is manyanta . If other people are involved the verbal auxiliary changes to indicate this.

With so much information contained in the verbal auxiliary, the sentence can be reduced to two words. The verb tells what the action was and the verbal auxiliary tells who or what was involved in the action. These two words form a mini-sentence.

Yani             manyanta.

went     he-with him                               'He went with him/her.'

Nyanya             palupinya.

saw                  they-pl them 2             They (3 or more) saw them (2).

Cases

In a Walmajarri sentence the words can be moved about fairly freely, unlike English which requires a fixed word order to maintain the same meaning, e.g. in the sentence 'The girl saw the boy', a change of order makes a new sentence with a different meaning, 'The boy saw the girl'.   Walmajarri word order is more free because where English uses word order and prepositions to indicate relationships between words in a sentence, Walmajarri uses suffixes. There are two types of cases in Walmajarri. One group is shown on the verbal auxiliary as well as on the nominal, i.e. they are cross referenced [Ergative, Accessory, Dative]. The other group is only shown on the nominal [Locative, Purposive, Preventative, Allative, Ablative, Consequent, Manner].

2.4 Nominals

The term nominal is used Walmajarri for word that potentially take the case suffixes. Most of these words would be clearly classified in English as nouns or adjectives. In Walmajarri this distinction is not clear because adjectives often take the place of nouns.

Manga purlka [kirta(E)]   pirriyani.

girl        big                        came

'The big girl came.'

Purlka [kirta(E)]             pirriyani.

'The big (girl) came.'

The form without the noun is used unless there is need to be specific about the person involved.

2.5 Verbs

The verb consists of a stem and four orders of suffixes. Stems may be monomorphemic or compound and are divided into five conjugation classes. Before tense suffixes can be added to the verb, the mood of the sentence has to be known. This is because there are two sets of suffixes, based on the Realis-Irrealis distinction. When the mood is indicative, interrogative or hortatory, the Realis Tense System applies. When the mood is intentive, admonitive, imperative, negative, prohibitive or inabilitative the Irrealis Tense System applies. In finite verbs the Realis Tense System makes four distinctions: past, customary and future, with present only in the repetiitive/continuous aspect. The Irrealis tense System distinguishes only two, past and non-past. The two infinite forms are non-past (infinitive) and past. The past expresses an action prior to that of the main verb.

Kamparnu-rla marna ngarni.

cook-past   I   ate

'After cooking it I ate it.'

The non-past is the infinitive to which the suffixes are added.

Kiy [Kuyu(E)] kamparnu-jangka   marna ngarni.

meat    cook-from    I   ate

'I ate the cooked meat.'

(Richards, Eirlys and Hudson Joyce. 1990. Walmajarri-English dictionary . Darwin: SIL)

2. References <up>

Hudson, Joyce and Richards, Eirlys. 1969. The phonology of Walmatjari. Oceanic Linguistics. 8:2 171-89.

Hudson, Joyce. 1978. The core of Walmatjari grammar. Canberra: A.I.A.S.

Hudson, Joyce and Richards, Eirlys et al (1978) The Walmatjari: an introduction to the language and culture. Work Papers of SIL-AAB, B:1.

Richards, Eirlys.1979. The Walmajarri noun phrase. Work Papers of SIL-AAB, A:3 93-127.

Richards, Eirlys and Hudson Joyce. 1990. Walmajarri-English dictionary. Darwin: SIL.