The Yirram or Jaminjungan languages, also known as ''Western Mirndi'', are a branch of the

Mirndi languages The Mirndi or Mindi languages are an Australian language family spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. The family consists of two sub-groups, the Yirram languages and the Barkly languages some 200 km farther to the southeast, se ...

spoken around the Victoria River in the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Au ...

of Australia. The name of these languages is derived from the dual

clitic 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 ...

which is ''"yirram"'' in each of the languages. It consists of two languages, the Nungali language and the

Jaminjung language Jaminjung is a moribund Australian language spoken around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. There seems to be a steady increase in the number of speakers of the language with very few people speaking the language in ...

. A third language has been proposed, Ngaliwurru, but it is often thought to be merely a dialect of the

References

Indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory {{ia-lang-stub