Pitjantjatjara language

Pitjantjatjara
Spoken in	Northwest South Australia
Native speakers	2,500  (date missing)
Language family	Pama–Nyungan Southwest Wati Western Desert Pitjantjatjara
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	pjt

Pitjantjatjara (Aboriginal pronunciation: [ˈb̥ɪɟanɟaɟaɾa]) is a dialect of the Western Desert Language traditionally spoken by the Pitjantjatjara people of Central Australia. It is mutually intelligible with other varieties of the Western Desert language and is particularly closely related to Yankunytjatjara language. Features distinctive to Pitjantjatjara include -pa endings on words that would otherwise end with consonants, a preference to not have y at the start of most words, and the use of pitjantja to mean coming/going (as opposed to yankunytja in Yankunytjatjara). This last distinction is how the language gets its name.

Only about 20% of Pitjantjatjara speakers know English.^{[citation needed]} This caused controversy in May 2007, when the Australian government launched a plan to force Aboriginal children to learn English. Between 50% and 70% are literate in their own language.^{[citation needed]} There is a lot of resentment among Aboriginal people about the lack of recognition of their languages from the government and the Australian population.^{[citation needed]}

The longest official place name in Australia is a Pitjantjatjara word, Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill in South Australia, which means "where the Devil urinates".

Grammar

Nouns and noun phrases

Pitjantjatjara uses case marking to show the role of nouns within the clause as subject, object, location, etc. Pitjantjatjara is a language with split ergativity, since its nouns and pronouns show different case marking patterns (Bowe 1990:9-12).

Consider the following example, where the subject of a transitive verb is marked with the ergative case and the object with the absolutive case (Bowe 1990:10):

Minyma-ngku	tjitji	nya-ngu.
woman-ergative	child(absolutive)	see-past
'The woman saw the child.'

This can be contrasted with the following sentence with an intransitive verb, where the subject takes the absolutive case:

Tjitji	a-nu.
child(absolutive)	go-past
'The child went.'

In contrast to the ergative-absolutive pattern that applies to nouns, pronouns show a nominative-accusative pattern. Consider the following examples, with pronoun subjects (Bowe 1990:11):

Ngayu-lu	tjitji	nya-ngu.
I-nom	child(absolutive)	see-past
'I saw the child.'

Ngayu-lu	a-nu.
I-nom	go-past
'I went.'

Verbs and verb phrases

Pitjantjatjara verbs inflect for tense. Pitjantjatjara has four different classes of verbs, each of which takes slightly different endings (the classes are named according to their imperative suffixes): ∅-class verbs,la-class verbs, wa-class verbs, and ra-class verbs.

Derivational morphology

It also has systematic ways of changing words from one part of speech to another, e.g., making nouns from verbs, and vice-versa. However the words formed this way may have slightly different meanings that cannot be guessed from the pattern alone.

Segmental Phonology and Orthography

There are slightly different standardised spellings used in the Northern Territory and Western Australia compared to South Australia, for example with the first two writing ⟨w⟩ between ⟨a⟩ and ⟨u⟩ combinations and a ⟨y⟩ between ⟨a⟩ and ⟨i⟩, which SA doesn't use.

Pitjantjatjara has the following consonant inventory, written as shown in bold:

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Plosive	p [p]~[b]	t [t]~[d]	ṯ [ʈ]~[ɖ]	tj [c]~[ɟ]	k [k]~[ɡ]
Nasal	m [m]	n [n]	ṉ [ɳ]	ny [ɲ]	ng [ŋ]
Trill/Tap		r [r]~[ɾ]
Lateral		l [l]	ḻ [ɭ]	ly [ʎ]
Approximant	w [w]	ṟ [ɻ]~[ɹ]		y [j]

Pitjantjatjara has three vowels:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i [ɪ], ii [ɪː]		u [ʊ], uu [ʊː]
Open		a [a], aa [aː]

Pitjantjatjara vowels have a length contrast which is indicated by writing them doubled. In the past, a colon ⟨:⟩ was sometimes used to indicate long vowels: ⟨a:⟩, ⟨i:⟩, ⟨u:⟩.

Pronunciation of the name

The name Pitjantjatjara is usually pronounced (in normal, fast speech) with one of the repeated syllables -tja- deleted, thus: pitjantjara. In slow, careful speech all syllables will be pronounced.

Unicode

Pitjantjatjara requires the following underlined letters, which can be either ordinary letters with underline formatting, or Unicode characters which include a line below:

• Ḻ: unicode 1E3A
• ḻ: unicode 1E3B
• Ṉ: unicode 1E48
• ṉ: unicode 1E49
• Ṟ: unicode 1E5E
• ṟ: unicode 1E5F
• Ṯ: unicode 1E6E
• ṯ: unicode 1E6F

External links

• Ngapartji Online course of Pitjantjatjara language, and related performance event 2006
• Ethnologue report for language code:pjt
• Languages and dialects associated with Uluru
• Omniglot.com

References

• Bowe, Heather. 1990. Categories, Constituents, and Constituent Order in Pitjantjatjara, An Aboriginal Language of Australia. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415056942
• Goddard, Cliff (1996). Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara to English Dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD Press. ISBN 0-949659-91-6. 
• Goddard, Cliff (1985). A Grammar of Yankunytjatjara. Institute for Aboriginal Develoepment Press. ISBN 0-949659-32-0. 
• Langlois, Annie (2004). Alive and Kicking: Areyonga Teenage Pitjantjatjara, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. ISBN 0858835460