Kunjen language

Kunjen
Oykangand
Spoken in	Australia
Region	Cape York Peninsula, Queensland
Native speakers	20  (1991)
Language family	Pama–Nyungan Paman Western Upper Kunjen
Dialects	Uw Oykangand Uw Olkola
Language codes
ISO 639-3	kjn

Kunjen is a Paman language spoken on the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia, by the Uw Olkola and Uw Oykangand people. The two dialects, Uw Olkola and Uw Oykangand, are very close, being mutually intelligible and sharing 97% of their core vocabulary.

A small dictionary of Kunjen has been compiled by Philip Hamilton.

Respect register

As in many other Australian languages, such as Dyirbal, Kunjen also has a respect register, which is a polite way of speaking with a potential mother-in-law and is called Olkel-Ilmbanhthi. Most of the vocabulary is replaced, while affixes and function words are kept.

The sentence below is in normal Uw Oykangand:

Alka-nhdh idu-rr ay

spear-instr spear-pst I

"I speared it with a spear"

The equivalent in Olkel-Ilmbanhthi is:

Udnga-nhdh yanganyunyja-rr ay

spear-instr spear-pst I

"I speared it with a spear"

Phonology

Vowels

Kunjen has 5 vowels:

	Front	Back
	Unrounded	Rounded
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
Open	a

There is a lexical vowel harmony constraint in Kunjen: Close and mid vowels do not co-occur in a word.

Consonants

Kunjen has 27 consonants:

		Peripheral		Laminal		Apical
		Bilabial	Velar	Palatal	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex
Plosive	Voiceless	p /p/	k /k/	ch /c/	th /t̪/	t /t/
	Voiced	b /b/	g /g/	j /ɟ/	dh /d̪/	d /d/
Nasal	Plain	m /m/	ng /ŋ/	ny /ɲ/	nh /n̪/	n /n/
	Prestopped	bm /ᵇm/	gng /ᶢŋ/	jny /ᶡɲ/	dnh /ᵈ̪n̪/	dn /ᵈn/
Trill						rr /r/
Approximant	Central	w /w/		y /j/			r /ɻ/
	Lateral			ly /ʎ/	lh /l̪/	l /l/