The Warlpiri ( or ) language is an

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 ...

spoken by close to 3,000 of the Warlpiri people from the Tanami Desert, northwest of

Alice Springs Alice Springs () is a town in the Northern Territory, Australia; it is the third-largest settlement after Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin and Palmerston, Northern Territory, Palmerston. The name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William ...

Central Australia Central Australia, also sometimes referred to as the Red Centre, is an inexactly defined region associated with the geographic centre of Australia. In its narrowest sense it describes a region that is limited to the town of Alice Springs and ...

. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Pama–Nyungan family and is one of the largest Aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers. One of the most well-known terms for The Dreaming (an Aboriginal spiritual belief), ''Jukurrpa'', derives from Warlpiri. Warnayaka (Wanayaga, Woneiga), Wawulya (Ngardilpa), and Ngalia are regarded as probable dialects of Warlpiri on the

AUSTLANG The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), established as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1964, is an independent Australian Government statutory authority. It is a collecting, ...

database, although with potentially no data; while Ngardilypa is confirmed.

Avoidance register

In Warlpiri culture, it is considered impolite or shameful for certain family relations to converse. (For example, a woman should not converse with her son-in-law.) If such conversation is necessary, speakers use a special style of the language, the avoidance register. The avoidance register has the same grammar as ordinary Warlpiri but a drastically reduced lexicon. Most content words are replaced by a generic synonym or a word unique to the avoidance register.

Sign language

Warlpiri Sign Language exists as well as the spoken language.

Phonology

In the following tables of the Warlpiri sound system, symbols in give the practical alphabet used by the Warlpiri community.

Phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

values in IPA are shown in /slashes/ and phonetic values in quare brackets

Vowels

Warlpiri has a standard three-vowel system, similar to that of

Classical Arabic Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...

, with a phonemic length distinction creating a total of six possible vowels.

Consonants

As shown in the chart, Warlpiri distinguishes five positions of articulation and has oral and nasal stops at each position. The oral stops have no

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...

distinction, but they display voiced and unvoiced

allophones In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosi ...

. Stops are usually unvoiced at the beginning of a word and voiced elsewhere. In both positions, they are usually unaspirated. Warlpiri, like most other Australian languages, has no

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

consonants.

Syllables and stress

Warlpiri

syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

are quite constrained in structure. All syllables begin with a single consonant, there are no syllable-initial consonant clusters and no syllable begins with a vowel. After the consonant is a single long or short vowel, which is sometimes followed by a single closing consonant. Open syllables are much more common than closed ones. No syllable ends with a stop or with the retroflex flap /ɽ/. The most common kind of consonant cluster occurs when a syllable ends with a nasal consonant and the next syllable begins with the corresponding stop, but other clusters like /rk/ and /lp/ also occur. Stress is not generally distinctive but is assigned by rule. Polysyllabic words receive primary stress on the first syllable, with secondary stresses tending to occur on alternate syllables thereafter; this rhythm may be broken by the structure of the word and so some three-syllable stress groups occur.

Vowel harmony

If two adjacent syllables in a Warlpiri

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

have high vowels, those high vowels are almost always alike: both /u/ or both /i/. The number of Warlpiri roots with adjacent syllables having /u/ and /i/ is very small. Both ''progressive'' and ''regressive'' vowel harmony occur. In progressive vowel harmony, the second vowel changes to match the first; in regressive harmony, the first changes to match the second. The tendency to prefer adjacent high vowels to be identical also spreads across morpheme boundaries within a word. Adding a suffix to a word can place a /u/ and an /i/ in contact. When that happens, one of the vowels tends to assimilate by changing to match the other vowel. That kind of assimilation is called

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

and is common in the world's languages. It is found, for example, in Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian and Turkish. Regressive harmony occurs only when a tense suffix is attached to a verb (see below). For example, when the verb (class 2) is placed in the past tense with the suffix , the result is , not . Progressive harmony occurs with most other kinds of suffixes. For example, when the ergative case suffix is attached to the noun 'boomerang', the result is , not . On occasion, long chains of high vowels can assimilate, each forcing the next. For example, when the class 2 verb is attached to the past tense suffix ''-rnu'', the resulting word is .

Words

No Warlpiri word begins with an alveolar consonant; the first consonant of a word must be bilabial, palatal, retroflex or velar. Exceptions include borrowings such as 'dollar', from English ''dollar''. All Warlpiri words end in vowels. When a word's final meaningful component ends in a consonant, the repair strategy is almost always to append a meaningless suffix, usually .

Alphabet

Since the 1950s, Warlpiri has been written in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

using an alphabet originally devised by Lothar Jagst and later modified slightly. The Warlpiri alphabet uses only ordinary letters, with no accent marks, and has the following deviations from IPA: #Long vowels are written by doubling the vowel letter: ''ii'', ''aa'', ''uu''. #Retroflex consonants are written with digraphs formed by prefixing ''r'' to the usual alveolar symbol: ''rt'', ''rn'', ''rl''. #The palatal stop is written ''j''. #Other palatals are written with digraphs formed by suffixing ''y'' to the usual alveolar symbol: ''ny'', ''ly''. The palatal approximant is written ''y''. #The velar nasal is written ''ng''. #The alveolar trill is written ''rr''. #The retroflex flap is written ''rd''. #The retroflex approximant is written ''r''. To those basic rules are added two adjustments to make the alphabet easier to use. #The indicators ''y'' (for palatal) and ''r'' (for retroflex) are often dropped if they are redundant in consonant clusters with the same position of articulation: ''nyj'' is written ''nj'', ''rnrt'' is written ''rnt''. #At the beginning of a word, the retroflex indicator ''r'' may be omitted. That does not produce ambiguity because no Warlpiri word begins with a plain alveolar consonant: 'foot' is written .

Morphology

Verbs

Warlpiri verbs are built from a few hundred verb roots, distributed among five conjugation classes. Two of the classes contain the vast majority of verb roots; the other three classes have only a few roots each. A large class of modifying prefixes, or ''preverbs'', are used to create verbs with specific meanings. For example, the verb root means 'run' by itself, and means 'scurry into hiding'. The preverb is used with a few other verb roots to form other verbs of hiding or seclusion. Preverbs are sometimes reduplicated for emphasis or to change the meaning. Most preverb-verb combinations are fixed in the lexicon, and new combinations cannot be created freely. However, a few preverbs are very productive and can be combined with many different roots, and some roots accept almost any preverb. The verb root is followed by a tense suffix. There are five tense suffixes for each conjugation class, as shown in the following table. (Some optional variations have been omitted.)

Nouns

Warlpiri nouns are assembled from thousands of roots, with a rich array of derivational techniques such as compounding and derivational suffixes. Plurals are formed by reduplication of the root.

Auxiliary word and agreement suffixes

Each full Warlpiri clause may contain an ''auxiliary'' word, which, together with the verb suffix, serves to identify tense and to clarify the relationship between main and dependent clauses. Common auxiliaries include (present tense), (future tense), (conditional). The auxiliary word is almost always the second word of a clause. The auxiliary word also functions as the home for an elaborate family of suffixes that specify the person and number of the subject and object of the clause. They are similar to the familiar conjugational suffixes that agree with the subject in

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

, but in Warlpiri, they are placed on the auxiliary instead of on the verb and agree with the object as well as the subject. An example of a suffixed auxiliary word can be seen in the farewell, 'I will see you.' Here, indicates future tense, ''-rna'' indicates first-person singular subject 'I', ''-ngku'' indicates second-person singular object 'you' and is the nonpast form of the class 3 verb 'see'. In the past tense, the auxiliary word often drops out completely. In that case, the agreement suffixes attach instead to the first or second word of the clause, as in 'I saw you'. The junction at which the agreement suffixes are attached can trigger progressive vowel harmony. Thus, '(S)he will see you' shows the vowel of the suffix ''-ngku'' (second-person singular object) assimilating to the final vowel of .

References

Sources

*Nash, David (1980). ''Topics in Warlpiri Grammar'', PhD thesis, MIT. *Laughren, Hoogenraad, Hale, Granites (1996). ''A Learner's Guide to Warlpiri: Tape course for beginners'', IAD Press, Alice Springs.