01
Desert and River Country
Ngumpin-Yapa is a group of about a dozen closely related languages spoken across the Tanami Desert and the country to its north and west. Its Yapa branch is Warlpiri and Warlmanpa, in the Tanami. Its Ngumpin branch stretches from the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory into the southern Kimberley of Western Australia: Gurindji, Bilinarra, Ngarinyman and Mudburra in the east, and Jaru, Walmajarri and Ngardi in the west. Yapa is the Warlpiri word for an Aboriginal person, and ngumpin is a word for 'man' in several Ngumpin languages.
Earlier classifications treated Ngumpin and Yapa (then called Ngarrka) as separate groups. Patrick McConvell and Mary Laughren (2004) showed that they share a set of innovations in sound, grammar and vocabulary, and so descend from a single ancestor within Pama-Nyungan. The languages are close enough that the group is thought to have spread relatively recently, but when, and in which direction, is debated.
Warlpiri is by far the largest, with about 2,600 people using it at home in the 2021 census, mostly in Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Willowra and Nyirrpi, and it is still learned by children. Kenneth Hale's work on it from the late 1950s made it one of the most closely studied Australian languages. Gurindji country is the setting of the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off, a turning point in the Aboriginal land rights movement.
02
Free Word Order and New Mixed Languages
Warlpiri is the textbook example of free word order. In Ngarrka-ngku ka wawirri panti-rni 'The man is spearing the kangaroo', the ergative suffix -ngku marks the man as the doer, so the nouns and the verb can appear in almost any order. The one fixed point is the auxiliary, here ka, which comes second in the clause and carries tense and bound pronouns. Hale (1983) used such sentences to argue that some languages lack the fixed phrase structure of English, an idea known as non-configurationality that is still debated in syntactic theory.
The group has also produced two of the best-documented new languages in Australia. Light Warlpiri, described by Carmel O'Shannessy (2005), arose at Lajamanu from the 1970s and 1980s; it combines Warlpiri noun endings with verbs drawn largely from English and Kriol, and has an auxiliary system of its own. It has about 350 speakers, all under about 40, who also speak Warlpiri. Gurindji Kriol, spoken at Kalkaringi and Daguragu, takes its verb structure from Kriol and its nouns and case endings from Gurindji (McConvell and Meakins 2005). Both are the first language of many children, while the older languages are learned alongside them.
In its own words
Ngarrka-ngku ka wawirri panti-rni.
- Ngarrka-ngku
- ka
- wawirri
- panti-rni.
Sources (1)
Where it’s spoken
- Australia
Turning points
- SplitContested
One group, two halves
The ancestor of Ngumpin and Yapa separates from other Pama-Nyungan languages, and its descendants spread across the Tanami and into the Victoria River country. The languages' closeness suggests a fairly recent spread, but its date and direction are disputed.
Sources (2)
- Contact
Wave Hill walk-off
Gurindji stockmen and their families, led by Vincent Lingiari, walk off Wave Hill cattle station in protest at wages and conditions. The strike becomes a claim to their own land; in 1975 the Commonwealth hands part of it back at Daguragu.
Sources (1)
- Writing
Warlpiri in the classroom
Yuendumu school begins teaching in Warlpiri and English under the Northern Territory bilingual education programme, spreading literacy in the language's Latin-based spelling. Other Warlpiri schools follow; the programme's funding has since been repeatedly cut.
Sources (1)
- Contact
New mixed languages
Children at Kalkaringi and Lajamanu grow up speaking Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri, which combine the nouns and case endings of the older language with verbs and verb structure from Kriol and English. Both began in code-switching between adults, but how they became separate languages is still being studied.
Sources (2)