Laragia language
| Laragiya | |
|---|---|
| Region | Near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia |
|
Native speakers
|
29 (2006 census) |
|
Darwin
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | lara1258 |
| AIATSIS | N21 |
The Laragiya language (Larrakia), also known as Gulumirrgin, is an Australian language isolate spoken by just six people near the city of Darwin in northern Australia as of 1983. The 2006 census reports 23 speakers, but these are not necessarily native or fluent.
Laragiya was once considered a language isolate, but Mark Harvey has made a case for it being part of a family of Darwin Region languages.
Linguist Arthur Capell wrote,
"Morphophonemic rules are not so complex in Laragia as in Maung and Jiwadja, though some are shared between the three languages. One in particular is shared with Ngarinyin in the Northern Kimberley Division of Western Australia. The chief difficulties in setting up an orthography for Laragia are due to certain morphophonemic rules, but others arise from the indefinite pronunciations..."
Concord formation
"Laragia is a member of the multiple-classifying language group, but has the somewhat unusual practice of combining prefixes and suffixes in the formation of the concord. The Laragia concord is shown by a discontinuous morpheme - at least in many cases, but not in the verb - partly prefixal and partly suffixal.
"It is what Zellig Harris called a 'broken sequence'. It may be mentioned in passing that the majority of the multiple-classifying languages in North Australia used prefixal forms to mark the classes, but a few, such as Worora and Unggumi in the Northern Kimberley Division of Western Australia, have vestigial suffixes, while a few on the Barkly Tablelands in the eastern part of the Northern Territory use only suffixes. These phenomena suggest that the languages originally had, as Laragia still does, markers at each end of the word."
...
Wikipedia