Dyirbal language
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Dyirbal (also ''Djirubal'') is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast
Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...
by the Dyirbal people. In 2016, the
Australian Bureau of Statistics The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is an List of Australian Government entities, Australian Government agency that collects and analyses statistics on economic, population, Natural environment, environmental, and social issues to advi ...
reported that there were 8 speakers of the language. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among
linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
s. In the years since the Dyirbal grammar by Robert Dixon was published in 1972, Dyirbal has steadily moved closer to
extinction Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...
as younger community members have failed to learn it.


Dialects

There are many different groups speaking dialects of Dyirbal language. Researcher Robert Dixon estimates that Dyirbal had, at its peak, 10 dialects. Dialects include: * Dyirbal (or Jirrbal) spoken by the Dyirbalŋan * Mamu, spoken by the Waɽibara, Dulgubara, Bagiɽgabara, Dyiɽibara, and Mandubara (There are also different types of Mamu spoken by individual groups, such as Warribara Mamu, and Dulgubara Mamu) * Giramay (Or Girramay), spoken by the Giramaygan * Gulŋay (or Gulngay), spoken by the Malanbara * Dyiru (or Djirru), spoken by the Dyirubagala * Ngadyan (or Ngadjan), spoken by the Ngadyiandyi * Walmalbarra The speakers of these dialects largely regard their dialects as different languages. They were classified as dialects by researcher Robert Dixon, who classified them as such based on linguistic criteria and their similarities, some dialects sharing as much as 90% of their vocabularies. Since the dialects were viewed by speakers as different languages, the language had no formal name, so Dixon assigned the language the name Dyirbal, naming it after Jirrbal, which was the dialect with the largest number of speakers at the time he was studying it.


Neighbouring languages

Languages neighbouring the many Dyirbal dialects include: * Ngaygungu * Mbabaram * Muluriji * Yidiny * Warungu * Warrgamay * Nyawaygi


Phonology


Consonants

Dyirbal has only four
places of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...
for the stop and nasals, whereas most other Australian Aboriginal languages have five or six. This is because Dyirbal lacks the dental/ alveolar/
retroflex A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...
split typically found in these languages. Like the majority of Australian languages, it does not make a distinction between voiced consonants (, etc.) and voiceless consonants (the corresponding , etc.), respectively. Like
Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...
, standard Dyirbal
orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...
uses voiced consonants, which seem to be preferred by speakers of most Australian languages since the sounds (which can often be semi-voiced) are closer to English semi-voiced than aspirated .


Vowels

The Dyirbal
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
system is typical of Australia, with three vowels: , and , though is realised as in certain environments and can be realised as , also depending on the environment in which the
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
appears. Thus the actual inventory of sounds is greater than the inventory of phonemes would suggest. Stress always falls on the first syllable of a word and usually on subsequent odd-numbered syllables except the ultima, which is always unstressed. The result of this is that consecutive stressed syllables do not occur.


Grammar

The language is best known for its system of
noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
es, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following
semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
lines: * I – most animate objects, men * II – women,
water Water is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula . It is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance. It is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known liv ...
,
fire Fire is the rapid oxidation of a fuel in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products. Flames, the most visible portion of the fire, are produced in the combustion re ...
,
violence Violence is characterized as the use of physical force by humans to cause harm to other living beings, or property, such as pain, injury, disablement, death, damage and destruction. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence a ...
, and exceptional
animal Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the Biology, biological Kingdom (biology), kingdom Animalia (). With few exceptions, animals heterotroph, consume organic material, Cellular respiration#Aerobic respiration, breathe oxygen, ...
s * III – edible
fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants (angiosperms) that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which angiosperms disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in particular have long propaga ...
and
vegetable Vegetables are edible parts of plants that are consumed by humans or other animals as food. This original meaning is still commonly used, and is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including edible flower, flo ...
s * IV – miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three) The class usually labelled "feminine" (II) inspired the title of
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff ( ; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The ...
's book '' Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things''. Some linguists distinguish between such systems of classification and the gendered division of items into the categories of "feminine", "masculine" and (sometimes) "neuter" that is found in, for example, many
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. ...
. Dyirbal shows a split-ergative system. Sentences with a first or second person pronoun have their
verb argument In linguistics, an argument is an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries. In this regard, the '' complement'' is a closely related concept. Most predicate ...
s marked for case in a pattern that mimics nominative–accusative languages. That is, the first or second person pronoun appears in the least marked case when it is the subject (regardless of the transitivity of the verb), and in the most marked case when it is the direct object. Thus Dyirbal is morphologically accusative in the first and second persons, but morphologically ergative elsewhere; and it is still always syntactically ergative.


Taboo

There used to be in place a highly complex ''
taboo A taboo is a social group's ban, prohibition or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred or allowed only for certain people.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
'' system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people. Speakers were forbidden from speaking with their cross-cousins of the opposite sex due to the fact that those relatives were of the section from which an individual must marry, but were too close of kin to choose as a spouse so the avoidance might have been on the grounds of indicating anyone sexually unavailable. Furthermore, because marriage typically took place a generation above or below, the cross-cousin of the opposite sex often is a potential mother-in-law or father-in-law. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same
phonemes 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 ...
and
grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...
, but with a
lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...
that shared no words with the standard language except for four lexical items referring to grandparents on the mother and father's side. The taboo relationship was reciprocal. Thus, an individual was not allowed to speak with one's own mother-in-law and it was equally taboo for the mother-in-law to speak to her son-in-law. This relationship also prevailed among both genders such that a daughter-in-law was forbidden to speak to directly or approach her father-in-law and vice versa. This taboo existed, but less strongly enforced, between members of the same sex such that a male individual ought to have used the respectful style of speech in the presence of his father-in-law, but the father-in-law could decide whether or not to use the everyday style of speech or the respectful style in the presence of his son-in-law. The specialized and complex form of the language, the Dyalŋuy, was used in the presence of the taboo relatives whereas a form referred to in most dialects as Guwal was used in all other circumstances. The Dyalŋuy had one quarter of the amount of lexical items as the everyday language which reduced the semantic content in actual communication in the presence of a taboo relative. For example, in Dyalŋuy the verb 'to ask' is . In Guwal, 'to ask' is , 'to invite someone over' is , 'to invite someone to accompany one' is and 'to keep asking after having already been told' is . There are no correspondences to the other 3 verbs of Guwal in Dyalŋuy. To get around this limitation, Dyirbal speakers use many syntactic and semantic tricks to make do with a minimal vocabulary which reveals a lot to linguists about the semantic nature of Dyirbal. For example, Guwal makes use of lexical causatives, such as and . This is similar to English "He broke the glass" (transitive) vs. "The glass broke." (intransitive). Since Dyirbal has fewer lexemes, a morpheme is used as an intransitive derivational suffix. Thus the Dyalŋuy equivalents of the two words above were transitive and intransitive . The lexical items found in Dyalŋuy were mainly derived from three sources: "borrowings from the everyday register of neighbouring dialects or languages, the creation of new yalŋuyforms by phonological deformation of lexemes from the language's own everyday style, and the borrowing of terms that were already in the yalŋuystyle of a neighboring language or dialect". An example of borrowing between dialects is the word for sun in the Yidin and Ngadyan dialects. In Yidin, the Guwal style word for sun is uŋan and this same word was also the Dyalŋuy style of the word for sun in the Ngadyan dialect. It is hypothesized that children of Dyirbal tribes were expected to acquire the Dyalŋuy speech style years following their acquisition of the everyday speech style from their cross cousins who would speak in Dyalŋuy in their presence. By the onset of puberty, the child probably spoke Dyalŋuy fluently and was able to use it in the appropriate contexts. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930, when the taboo system fell out of use.


Young Dyirbal

In the 1970s, speakers of Dyirbal and Giramay dialects purchased land in the Murray Upper, with the assistance of the Australian federal government and formed a community. Within this community shift in language began to occur, and with it came the emergence of new form of Dyirbal, dubbed by researcher Annette Schmidt "Young Dyirbal" or "YD". This language stands in contrast to "Traditional Dyirbal" or "TD". Young Dyirbal is grammatically distinct from Traditional Dyirbal, in some cases being more similar to English, such as the gradual loss of ergative inflection, as is found in Traditional Dyirbal, in favour of a style of inflection more similar to the one found in English.


Notes


References

*


External links


Lecture notes on Dyirbal illustrating mother-in-law languageBibliography of Dyirbal people and language resources
, at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Bibliography of Girramay people and language resources
, at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Bibliography of the Gulngay people and language resources
at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Rosetta Project: Dyirbal Swadesh ListJirrbal Language Recordings
State Library of Queensland State Library of Queensland (State Library) is the state public reference and research library of Queensland, Australia, operated by the Government of Queensland, state government. The Library is governed by the Library Board of Queensland, whi ...
{{Pama–Nyungan languages, East Dyirbalic languages Endangered indigenous Australian languages in Queensland Severely endangered languages