Kayardild is a moribund
Tangkic language spoken by the
Kaiadilt on the
South Wellesley Islands, north west
Queensland,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
, with fewer than ten fluent speakers remaining. Other members of the family include Yangkaal (spoken by the
Yangkaal
The Yangkaal, also spelt Yanggal, are an Aboriginal Australian people of area of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the state of Queensland.
Gananggalinda is a variant name of the same group.>
Language
The Yangkaal language was also known as Yanggar ...
people),
Lardil, and
Yukulta (Ganggalidda).
It is famous for its many unusual case phenomena, including
case stacking
Suffixaufnahme (, "suffix resumption"), also known as case stacking, is a linguistic phenomenon used in forming a genitive construction, whereby prototypically a genitive noun agrees with its head noun. The term Suffixaufnahme itself is literally ...
of up to four levels, the use of clause-level case to signal interclausal relations and pragmatic factors, and another set of 'verbal case' endings which convert their hosts from nouns into verbs morphologically.
Phonology
References
Bibliography
*
Further reading
* Evans, Nicholas. 1988. Odd topic marking in Kayardild. In Peter Austin, ed., Complex sentence constructions in Australian Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 219–266.
* Evans, Nicholas. 1992. Kayardild Dictionary and Thesaurus. University of Melbourne: Department of Linguistics and Language Studies.
* Evans Nicholas. 1995b. A Grammar of Kayardild. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
* Evans, Nicholas. 1995c. The Kayardild language. In Julia Robinson, ed. Voices of Queensland. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
* Evans, Nicholas. 1995d. Multiple case in Kayardild: anti-iconicity and the diachronic filter. In F. Plank, ed., Double case. Agreement by Suffixaufnahme. Oxford: University Press. pp. 396–428.
* Evans, Nicholas. 2001. Typologies of agreement: some problems from Kayardild. Transactions of the Philological Society 101.2:203-234.
* Evans, Nicholas. 2006. Kayardild. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 6. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 168–9.
* Round, Erich. 2009
Kayardild Morphology, Phonology, and Morphosyntax PhD dissertation, Yale University.
* Round, Erich. 2013. Kayardild Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Round, Erich and Corbett, Greville G. 2016. The theory of feature systems: one feature versus two for Kayardild tense-aspect-mood. Morphology 27 (1) 1-55.
{{Australian Aboriginal languages
Critically endangered languages
Endangered languages of Oceania
North West Queensland
Tangkic languages