| Warlpiri | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Northern Territory, Australia | |
| Total speakers: | 3000 | |
| Language family: | Pama-Nyungan South-West Ngarrkic Warlpiri |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | aus | |
| ISO 639-3: | wbp | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. The Northern Territory is a federal territory of Australia, occupying much of the center of the mainland continent as well as the central northern regions For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Australia topics. List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family The Pama-Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Indigenous Australian languages. The South-West Pama-Nyungan or Nyungic language group is the most diverse and widespread subfamily of the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia. Ngarrkic is a collective name for a pair of closely-related languages of Central Australia. ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages ISO 639 -3 (ISO 639-32007 is an international standard for Language codes The standard describes three‐letter codes for identifying languages In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's | ||
The Warlpiri language is spoken by about 3000 of the Warlpiri people in Australia's Northern Territory. The Warlpiri are a group of Indigenous Australians, many of whom speak the Warlpiri language. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Australia topics. The Northern Territory is a federal territory of Australia, occupying much of the center of the mainland continent as well as the central northern regions It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Southwest branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, and is one of the largest aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers. Ngarrkic is a collective name for a pair of closely-related languages of Central Australia. The South-West Pama-Nyungan or Nyungic language group is the most diverse and widespread subfamily of the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia. The Pama-Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Indigenous Australian languages.
Contents |
Phonology
In the following tables of the Warlpiri sound system, symbols in boldface give the practical orthography used by the Warlpiri community. Phonetic values in IPA are shown in [square brackets]. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic
Vowels
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| close | i [i], ii [iː] | u [u], uu [uː] | |
| open | a [a], aa [aː] |
Warlpiri has a standard three-vowel system similar to that of Classical Arabic, with a length distinction creating a total of six possible vowels. A front vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far forward A central vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between A back vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in some spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as A close vowel is a type of Vowel sound used in many spoken Languages The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as An open vowel is a Vowel sound of a type used in most spoken Languages The defining characteristic of an open vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far as Classical Arabic (CA also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad
Consonants
| bilabial | alveolar | retroflex | palatal | velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | p [p] | t [t] | rt [ʈ] | j [c] | k [k] |
| nasal | m [m] | n [n] | rn [ɳ] | ny [ɲ] | ng [ŋ] |
| trill | rr [r] | ||||
| flap | rd [ɽ] | ||||
| lateral | l [l] | rl [ɭ] | ly [ʎ] | ||
| approximant | w [w] | r [ɻ] | y [j] |
As shown in the chart, Warlpiri distinguishes five positions of articulation, and has oral and nasal stops at each position. In Phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a Consonant articulated with both Lips The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior Alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets In Phonetics, retroflex consonants are Consonant sounds used in some Languages (They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants Palatal consonants are Consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the Hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a Consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the Vocal tract. A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth allowing air to escape freely through the In Phonetics, a trill is a Consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the Place of articulation. In Phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of Consonantal sound which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (such as the The retroflex flap is a type of Consonantal sound used in some spoken Languages The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents Laterals are "L"-like Consonants pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue while air from the lungs escapes at one side or both Approximants are speech sounds ( Phonemes) that could be regarded as intermediate between Vowels and typical Consonants In the articulation of approximants The oral stops have no phonemic voice distinction, but display voiced and unvoiced allophones; stops are usually unvoiced at the beginning of a word, and voiced elsewhere. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of Phonetics. In Phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds ( Phones that belong to the same Phoneme. In both positions they are usually unaspirated.
Warlpiri, like most Australian languages, has no fricative consonants. Fricatives are Consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together
The consonant listed in the table as a retroflex flap is actually an unusual consonant, possibly unique to Warlpiri. The tongue-tip begins in retroflex position, but then moves forward rapidly, flapping against the alveolar ridge.
Syllables and stress
Warlpiri syllables are quite constrained in structure. A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds All syllables begin with a single consonant; there are no syllable-initial consonant clusters, and no syllable begins with a vowel. After the consonant comes 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 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, so that there are sometimes three-syllable stress groups.
Vowel harmony
If two adjacent syllables in a Warlpiri morpheme have high vowels, then those high vowels are almost always alike; that is, both u or both i. In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. The number of Warlpiri roots with adjacent syllables having u and i is very small.
This 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 this happens, one of the vowels tends to assimilate: that is, it changes to match the other vowel. This kind of assimilation is called vowel harmony. Assimilation is a common Phonological process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance ( see below) assimilatory phonological process involving Vowels in some languages (Vowel harmony is not rare in the world's languages: it is found, for example, in Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian, and Turkish. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Hungarian ( magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. The Mongolian language (mn [[ImageMonggol kelesvg 17px]] Mongɣol kele, Cyrillic: Монгол хэл Mongol khel) is the best-known member of Turkish ( tr Türkçe IPA) is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. English plurals like geese and German umlaut represent traces of vowel harmony in early Germanic languages. )
In Warlpiri, 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.
Regressive harmony only occurs when attaching a tense suffix to a verb (see below). For example, when the verb panti- (class 2) is placed in the past tense with the suffix -rnu, the result is not *pantirnu but panturnu.
Progressive harmony occurs with most other kinds of suffixes. For example, when the ergative case suffix -ngku is attached to the noun karli "boomerang", the result is karlingki, not *karlingku.
On occasion, long chains of high vowels can assimilate, each forcing the next. For example, when the class 2 verb kiji- is attached to the past tense suffix -rnu, the resulting word is kujurnu.
Words
No Warlpiri word begins with alveolar consonant; the first consonant of a word must be bilabial, palatal, retroflex, or velar.
All Warlpiri words end in vowels; a word that might otherwise end in a consonant is usually "corrected" by adding a meaningless suffix, usually -pa.
Orthography
Since the 1950s, Warlpiri has been written in the Roman alphabet using a system originally devised by Lothar Jagst and subsequently modified slightly. Warlpiri orthography uses only ordinary letters, with no accent marks. It is close to IPA, deviating in the following ways:
- 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 these basic rules are added two adjustments to make the orthography easier to use.
- The indicators y (for palatal) and r (for retroflex) are often dropped if redundant in consonant clusters that share articulation position. Examples: nyj is written nj, rnrt is written rnt.
- At the beginning of a word, the retroflex indicator r is omitted. This does not produce ambiguity, because no Warlpiri word begins with a plain alveolar consonant. Example: rtari "foot" is written tari.
Morphology
Verbs
Warlpiri verbs are built from a few hundred verb roots, distributed among five conjugation classes. Two of these 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 parnka- means "run" when used by itself, while wurulyparnka- means "scurry into hiding". The preverb wuruly- is used with a few other verb roots to form other verbs of hiding or seclusion. Preverbs are sometimes reduplicated for emphasis or to create a meaning distinction.
Most preverb-verb combinations are a fixed part of the lexicon; new combinations cannot be created freely. But there are a few preverbs that are very productive and can be combined with many different roots, and some roots will accept almost any preverb.
The verb root is followed by a tense suffix. There are five of these for each conjugation class, as shown in the following table. (Some optional variations have been omitted. )
| Class | Nonpast | Past | Imperative | Immediate future | Present |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | mi | ja | ya | ju | nya |
| 2 | rni | rnu | ka | ku | rninya |
| 3 | nyi | ngu | ngka | ngku | nganya |
| 4 | rni | rnu | nja | lku | rninya |
| 5 | ni | nu | nta | nku | nanya |
Nouns
Warlpiri nouns are assembled from thousands of roots, with a rich array of derivational techniques such as compounding and derivational suffixes.
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 ka (present tense), kapi (future tense), kaji (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. These are similar to the familiar conjugational suffixes that agree with the subject in Indoeuropean languages, but in Warlpiri they are placed on the auxiliary instead of on the verb, and they agree with the object as well as the subject.
An example of a suffixed auxiliary word can be seen in the farewell, kapirnangku nyanyi, "I will see you. " Here, kapi indicates future tense, -rna is the suffix for first person singular subject "I", -ngku indicates second person singular object "you", and nyanyi is the nonpast form of the class 3 verb "see".
In the past tense, the auxiliary word often drops out completely. In this case, the agreement suffixes attach instead to the first or second word of the clause, as in nyangurnangku, "I saw you".
The junction where the agreement suffixes are attached can trigger progressive vowel harmony. Thus, nyanyi kapingki, "(S)he will see you", shows the vowel of the suffix -ngku (second person singular object) assimilating to the final vowel of kapi.
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, the speakers use a special register of the Warlpiri language called the avoidance register. Avoidance speech, or " mother-in-law languages " is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu The avoidance register has the same grammar as ordinary Warlpiri, but a drastically reduced lexicon; most content words are replaced either by a generic synonym or by a word unique to the avoidance register.
Warlpiri Sign Language
The Warlpiri language has a signed as well as a spoken mode. See main article Warlpiri Sign Language. Warlpiri Sign Language is a Sign language used by the Warlpiri, an Aboriginal community in the central desert region of Australia.
References
- Nash, David (1980). Topics in Warlpiri Grammar. PhD thesis, MIT.
External links
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