Iwaidja language

Iwaidja, in phonemic spelling Iwaja, is an Australian aboriginal language of the Iwaidja people with about 150 speakers in northernmost Australia. Historically from the base of the Cobourg Peninsula, it is now spoken on Croker Island. It is still being learnt by children.

Iwaidja
Native toAustralia
RegionCroker Island, Northern Territory
EthnicityIwaidja people
Native speakers
123 (2016 census)[1]
Iwaidjan
Latin script
Language codes
ISO 639-3ibd
Glottologiwai1244
AIATSIS[2]N39
ELPIwaidja[3]

Phonology

Consonants

Iwaidja has the following 20 consonants.

Peripheral Laminal Apical
Bilabial Velar Postalveolar Alveolar Retroflex
Nasal mŋɲnɳ
Plosive pkctʈ
Approximant wɣjɻ
Flap ɽ
Trill r
Lateral (ʎ)lɭ
Lateral flap (ʎ̆)ɺɭ̆
Note: The postalveolar lateral and lateral flap are rare, and it cannot be ruled out that they are sequences of /lj/ and /ɺj/. The plosives are allophonically voiced, and are often written b d ɖ ɟ ɡ.

Vowels

Iwaidja has three vowels, /a, i, u/. The following table shows the allophones of the vowels as described by Pym and Larrimore.[4]

Vowel Allophone Environment
/i/ [iː] Occurs before laminal consonants.
[e] Occurs word initially.
[i] All other cases.
/a/ [ai] Occurs before laminal consonants.
[æ] Occurs following laminal consonants except utterance final. Free variation with [a] in this environment.
[au] Occurs before /w/. Free variation with [a] in this environment.
[a] All other cases.
/u/ [ui] Occurs before laminal consonants.
[o] Occurs following velar consonant. Free variation with [u] in this environment.
[u] All other cases.

Morphophonemics

Iwaidja has extensive morphophonemic alternation. For example, body parts occur with possessive prefixes, and these alter the first consonant in the root:

ŋa-ɺ̡uliaŋ-kuliɹuli
my footyour foothis/her foot

Both the words arm and to be sick originally started with an /m/, as shown in related languages such as Maung. The pronominal prefix for it, its altered the first consonant of the root. In Iwaidja, this form extended to the masculine and feminine, so that gender distinctions were lost, and the prefix disappeared, leaving only the consonant mutation—a situation perhaps unique in Australia, but not unlike that of the Celtic languages.

armto be sick
theya-mawur
"their arms"		a-macu
"they're sick"
he/she/itpawur
"his/her arm"		pacu
"s/he's sick"

Semantics

The Iwaidja languages are nearly unique among the languages of the world in using verbs for kin terms. Nouns are used for direct address, but transitive verbs in all other cases. In English something similar is done in special cases: he fathered a child; she mothers him too much. But these do not indicate social relationships in English. For example, he fathered a child says nothing about whether he is the man the child calls "father". An Iwaidja speaker, on the other hand, says I nephew her to mean "she is my aunt". Because these are verbs, they can be inflected for tense. In the case of in-laws, this is equivalent to my ex-wife or the bride-to-be in English. However, with blood relations, past can only mean that the person has died, and future only that they are yet to be born.

a-pana-maɽjarwu-n
I-to-himfutuream father tonoun
"my future son" (lit. "I will be his father")
ɹi-maka-ntuŋ
he-to-heris husband topast
"his ex/late wife" (lit. "he was husband to her")

Notes
  1. "Census 2016, Language spoken at home by Sex (SA2+)". stat.data.abs.gov.au. ABS. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  2. N39 Iwaidja at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
  3. Endangered Languages Project data for Iwaidja.
  4. Pym, Noreen, and Bonnie Larrimore. Papers on Iwaidja phonology and grammar. Series A Vol. 2., 1979.

References
  • Nicholas Evans, 2000. "Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family." In Linguistic Typology 4, 91-142. Mouton de Gruyter.
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