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 polysynthetic, though this grammatical complexity is being lost among the younger generations. According to Dixon (1980) there are around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated, but most of them are quite different from the correspondig 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.

Bibliography

  • Osborne, C.R. 1974. The Tiwi language. Canberra: AIAS
  • Dixon, R. M. W. 1980: The languages of Australia (Cambridge language surveys) Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 22329 6 (hard covers) and ISBN 0 531 29450 9 (paperback)

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