Dalabon is a Gunwinyguan language of Arnhem Land, Australia. It is a severely endangered language, with perhaps as few as three fluent speakers remaining as of 2018. Dalabon is also known as Dangbon (the Kune or Mayali name), Ngalkbun (the Jawoyn name), and Buwan (the Rembarrnga name).

Classification

Dalabon belongs to the Gunwinyguan languages branch of the Australian languages, its nearest relatives are Kunwinjku, Kune, Mayali (varieties often grouped together as Bininj Kunwok) and Kunbarlang. Its next closest relatives are Rembarrnga, and other languages within the Gunwinyguan family, including Jawoyn,

Ngalakgan The Ngalakgan are an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory. Language Ngalakgan is generally classified as a member of the Gunwinyguan family. Country Ngalakgan territory covered an estimated , north of the Roper River as far a ...

Ngandi The Ngandi were an indigenous Australian people of the Northern Territory. The Ngandji are another tribe, and the two are not to be confused. Country The Ngandi's lands, some 1,500 sq-miles in extent, encompassed the area around the upper Wil ...

Wubuy Nunggubuyu or Wubuy is an Australian Aboriginal language, the traditional language of the Nunggubuyu people. It is the primary traditional language spoken in the community of Numbulwar in the Northern Territory. The language is classified as sev ...

, and Enindhilyakwa.

Official status

Dalabon has no official status. Local schools spent years to hold sporadic programs teaching Dalabon, but these operations didn't receive enough governmental support. Therefore, the condition of programs is still vulnerable.

Dialect/Varieties

Given the limited number of Dalabon speakers, the study of dialects has become challenging to investigate. Speakers recall a distinction between two different types of speech, dalabon-djurrkdjurrk ("fast", "lively") and dalabon-murduk ("articulate"). However, no significant difference has been found between the two speeches.

Phonology and Orthography

Consonants

There are 22 or 23 phonemic consonants in Dalabon, depending on the phonemic status of /h/. A table containing the

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced ...

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s is given below with their orthographic representation (in angle brackets).

Vowels

There are 6 vowels in Dalabon. A table containing the

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

s is given below with their orthographic representation (in angle brackets).

Phonotactics

Dalabon restricts the trilled and long stops to only occur word-internally. Constraints regarding the edges of a phonological word also limit the glottal stop �from occurring word-initially. The syllable structure of Dalabon is CV(C)(C)(C), or more specifically: CV(L)(N)(h) ''or'' CV(L)(S) where: *L is a liquid consonant ( lateral or rhotic) *N is a

nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...

*S is a

peripheral consonant In Australian linguistics, the peripheral consonants are a natural class encompassing consonants articulated at the extremes of the mouth: labials ( lip) and velars ( soft palate). That is, they are the non- coronal consonants ( palatal, d ...

*h is a glottal consonant. Such complex codas are not unusual, and all combinations are enumerated as follows (words and translations taken from the dictionary).

Complex coda of two consonants

Complex coda of three consonants

Phonological processes

Dalabon has a pattern of eliding unstressed vowels and unstressed syllables. For example, the word /'cabale/ 'shoulder blade' is often realized as cable

Prosody

The location of phrasal stress in Dalabon appears one or two peaks with an initial rise into the first peak at the left edge of the constituent and a final fall at the right edge of the constituent.

Grammar

Although there is no complete grammatical description of the language, a number of aspects of Dalabon grammar have been described, including its bound pronominal system, polysynthetic word structure, verb conjugations, the use of subordination strategies, nominal subclasses, the demonstrative system, and the use of optional ergativity.

Morphology

The structure of Dalabon verbs: SEQ: sequential ‘and then’ CAUS: ‘because’ misc: various adverbial type prefixes BEN: benefactive applicative gin: ‘generic’ incorporated nouns bpin: ‘body part’ incorporated nouns num: ‘number’ prefixes COM: comitative applicative RR: Reflexive/reciprocal TAM: tense/aspect mood The diminutive

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

''=wurd'' is derived from noun ''wurd'' 'woman's child', its reduplication ''wurdurd'' means 'child'. ''wurd'' can attach to most word classes and functions in 3 ways of meaning: to denote small objects, to add emotional connotations and to serve as pragmatic functions (especially for interactional softening). The examples are shown below.

Syntax

Dalabon is a head-marking language. Dalabon has limited use of subordinate clauses, but it has a distinctive subordination strategy, which is to attach pronominal prefixes to the verb, and marked verbs are used for subordinate clause functionsEvans, N. (2006). subordinate1: the unmarked form of prefixes to show subordinate status, used when the status is overt by other means. subordinate2: used when prefixes are the only way to show subordination. dis: disharmonic, meaning odd-numbered generations. Examples are shown below:

Vocabulary

References

* Alpher, Barry. 1982. Dalabon dual-subject prefixes, kinship categories and generation skewing. In J. Heath, F. Merlan and A. Rumsey, eds, Languages of Kinship in Aboriginal Australia, 19-30. Sydney: Oceania Linguistic Monographs #24 * Cutfield, Sarah. 2011. ''Demonstratives in Dalabon: A language of southwestern Arnhem Land.'' (Doctoral dissertation, Monash University; xx+485pp.) * Evans, Nicholas, Dunstan Brown & Greville Corbett. 2001. Dalabon pronominal prefixes and the typology of syncretism: a Network Morphology analysis. ''Yearbook of Morphology 2000'', 187-231. * Evans, Nicholas. 2006. Who said polysynthetic languages avoid subordination? Multiple subordination strategies in Dalabon. ''Australian Journal of Linguistics'' 26.1:31-58. * Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Standing up your mind: remembering in Dalabon. In Mengistu Amberber (ed.) The language of memory in a crosslinguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 67–95. * Evans, Nicholas,

Janet Fletcher Janet Fletcher is an Australian linguist. She completed her BA (with honours) at the University of Queensland in 1981 and then moved to the United Kingdom and received her PhD from the University of Reading in 1989. Fletcher's research intere ...

& Belinda Ross. 2008. Big words, small phrases: mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon. ''Linguistics'' 46.1:87-127. * Evans, Nicholas & Francesca Merlan. 2003. Dalabon verb conjugations. In Nicholas Evans (ed.). ''The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region''. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 269–283. * Evans, Nicholas, Francesca Merlan & Maggie Tukumba. 2004. ''A first dictionary of Dalabon (Ngalkbon)''. Maningrida: Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation. Pp. xxxviii + 489. * * Ponsonnet, Maïa. 2009
Aspects of the Semantics of Intellectual Subjectivity in Dalabon (South-Western Arnhem Land)
''Australian Aboriginal Studies'', 2009/1:17-28. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. * * * * * *

External links

Bibliography of Dalabon people and language resources
at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Dalabon collection
at the Endangered Languages Archive {{Australian Aboriginal languages Gunwinyguan languages Indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory