Wambaya language

Wambaya
Native to Australia
Region Barkly Tableland, Northern Territory
Ethnicity Binbinga Indigenous Australians
Native speakers
 20 (2005) to 88 (2006 census)[1]
Dialects
  • Wambaya
  • Gudanji
  • Binbinka
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Either:
wmb – Wambaya
nji – Gudanji
Glottolog guda1245[2]
AIATSIS[1] C19 Wambaya, C26 Gurdanji, N138 Binbinga

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 unique 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 89 by 2013 (http://www.ethnologue.com/language/wmb).

Nordlinger believes that Wambaya, Gudanji and Binbinka are dialects of one language.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 Wambaya at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies  (see the info box for additional links)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Gudanji–Binbinga–Wambaya". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. 1 2 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. ↑ Nordlinger, Rachel. (1998), A Grammar Of Wambaya, Northern Territory (Australia), p. 3.


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