Tiwi language

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Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia. It is one of about 10% of Australian languages still being learned by children.

Traditional Tiwi, spoken by people over the age of fifty by 2005, is polysynthetic. However, this grammatical complexity has been lost among younger generations. According to Dixon (1980) there are around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated into verbs, most of them quite different from the corresponding free forms.

Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate, although recent evidence using the experimental historical linguistic technique of structural phylogenetics^{[clarification needed]} suggests that Tiwi may in fact be related to the Gunwinyguan language family.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Phonology

As do most Australian languages, Tiwi has four phonetically distinct series of coronal stops. (See Indigenous Australian languages#Coronal consonants.) There are contrasting alveolar and postalveolar apical consonants, the latter often called retroflex. However, the two laminal series are in complementary distribution, with postalveolar laminal [t̠] (sometimes described as alveolo-palatal) occurring before the front vowel /i/, and denti-alveolar laminal [t̪] occurring before the non-front vowels, /a/, /o/, /u/. That is, phonologically Tiwi has at most three series. However, some analyses treat postalveolar [ʈ] as a sequence /ɻt/, since it only occurs in medial position.

In addition, Tiwi has a velar approximant, which is somewhat unusual for an Australian language. Typically for an Australian language, there are no fricatives.

Tiwi allows consonant clusters in medial position. Besides the possibility of /ɻt/ for [ʈ], these include other liquid-stop clusters and nasal-stop clusters such as /mp/. (There is little reason to choose between an analysis of /mp/ as being a cluster as opposed to a prenasalized stop (Anderson 1994:133).)

[edit] Bibliography

• Anderson, Victoria Balboa, and Ian Maddieson. 1994. "Acoustic Characteristics of Tiwi Coronal Stops". In UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 87: Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages II
• Osborne, C.R. 1974. The Tiwi language. Canberra: AIAS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies)
• R. M. W. Dixon. 1980. The languages of Australia. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge language surveys)

[edit] External links

• Ethnologue report for Tiwi

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