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Wambaya language

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Wambaya
McArthur River
Native toAustralia
RegionBarkly Tableland, Northern Territory
EthnicityWambaya, Gudanji, Binbinga
Native speakers
61 (2016 census)[1]
Dialects
  • Wambaya
  • Gudanji
  • Binbinka
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
wmb – Wambaya
nji – Gudanji
Glottologwamb1258
AIATSIS[2]C19 Wambaya, C26 Gurdanji, N138 Binbinga
ELPWambaya

Wambaya is a Non-Pama-Nyungan West Barkly Australian language of the Mirndi language group[3] that is spoken in the Barkly Tableland of the Northern Territory, Australia.[4] Wambaya and the other members of the West Barkly languages are somewhat unusual in that they are suffixing languages, unlike most Non-Pama-Nyungan languages which are prefixing.[3]

The language was reported to have 12 speakers in 1981, and some reports indicate that the language went extinct as a first language.[5] However, in the 2011 Australian census 56 people stated that they speak Wambaya at home.[6] That number increased to 61 in the 2016 Census.[7]

Rachel Nordlinger notes that the speech of the Wambaya, Gudanji and Binbinka people "are clearly dialects" of a single language, which she calls "McArthur", while Ngarnga is closely related but is "probably best considered a language of its own".[8]

References

  1. ^ "Census 2016, Language spoken at home by Sex (SA2+)". stat.data.abs.gov.au. ABS. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
  2. ^ C19 Wambaya at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies  (see the info box for additional links)
  3. ^ a b Nordlinger, Rachel. (1998), A Grammar Of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia), p. 1.
  4. ^ Ethnologue
  5. ^ Bender, Emily M. (2008), Evaluating a Crosslinguistic Grammar Resource: A Case Study of Wambaya, p. 2
  6. ^ http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/SSC70177?opendocument&navpos=220
  7. ^ "2016 Census: Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples QuickStats - Tennant Creek". www.censusdata.abs.gov.au. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  8. ^ Nordlinger, Rachel (1998). A Grammar of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia) (PDF). Pacific Linguistics. p. 2–3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)