Nyulnyul is an

dormant Dormant, "sleeping", may refer to: Science *Dormancy Dormancy is a period in an organism's life cycle when growth, development, and (in animals) physical activity are temporarily stopped. This minimizes metabolic activity and therefore helps ...

Australian Aboriginal language The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

, formerly spoken by the

Nyulnyul people The Nyulnyul, also spelt Nyul Nyul, Njolnjol, Nyolnyol and other variants, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Country According to Norman Tindale, the Nyulnyul held sway over some of tribal lan ...

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to ...

. Mary Carmel Charles is documented as the last fluent speaker of the Nyulnyul language of

Phonology

Consonants

Nyulnyul has seventeen consonant phonemes, with five distinct places of articulation. yulnyul is a morphologically complex language with both prefixing and suffixing.

Vowels

Nyulnyul uses a three vowel system, with contrastive length for all vowels.

Classification

Nyulnyul is very closely related to and was possibly mutually intelligible with Bardi, Jawi, Jabirrjabirr and Nimanburru. These are all members of the Western Nyulnyulan subgroup of

Nyulnyulan The Nyulnyulan languages are a small family of closely related Australian Aboriginal languages spoken in northern Western Australia. Most languages in this family are extinct, with only three extant languages, all of which are almost extinct. I ...

, a

non-Pama-Nyungan The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

family of northern Australia. It is possible that Ngumbarl also belongs to this group, although Bowern makes arguments from the Daisy Bates/ Billingee records that Ngumbarl is an Eastern Nyulnyulan language.Bowern, C. 2010
Two Missing Pieces in a Nyulnyulan Jigsaw Puzzle
"Linguistic Society of America Extended Abstracts". Speakers consider these all to be distinct.

Grammar

Nyulnyul is a morphologically complex language with both prefixing and suffixing. The language has an ergative alignment system. Nouns do not have classes, but case on phrases is marked through bound postpositions. Verbs roots are inflected for person and number of its subject, tense, mood and voice through prefixes. A number of suffixes with different meanings can also optionally be used. Verbs are also used in compound verb constructions where a non-inflecting preverb is used together with an inflected verb. The language also has a number of adverbs and particles. Clauses can also be constructed without the use of verbs when presentative, attributive or identifying. The

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

is free.

References

Literature

* * * * * * * * Nyulnyulan languages Extinct languages of Western Australia Kimberley (Western Australia) Languages extinct in the 1990s Indigenous Australian languages in Western Australia {{ia-lang-stub