Kaiadilt

The Kaiadilt are an indigenous Australian people of the South Wellesley group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia. They are native to Bentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to both Sweers and Allen Islands. Their descendents now live on Mornington Island, though one group has returned to Bentinck Island.

The Kayardild language is an agglutinating, completely suffixing member of the Tangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic including Yukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather than ergative. Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed from ka(ng) 'ìanguage' and yardild(a) 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'.

Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic unniversals in natural languages. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense", a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to Aristotle. Nicholas Evans discovered a breach in the theory, for Kaiadilt happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, for tense.

Kaiadilt was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, when Nicholas Evans began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40.

The general area is characterised by reef-building corals, predominantly Acropora hyacinthus and the associated molluscs, some 400 varierties of which had been discovered by the early 1900s. For the Kaiadilt, Bentinck island was Dulkawalnged (the land of all) while the outlying Sweers and Allen islands were Dangkawaridulk (lands void of men). Despite the poor soil, a wide variety of vegetables were noted by early travellers. The basic arborial cover consisted of small varieties of eucalyptus, casuarina and pandanus. The Kaiadilt lived on a maritime seafood economy, with nomadic movements determined by weather and seasons. The division of labour meant women gathered on the littoral such foods as small rock oysters (tjilangind), mud cockles (kulpanda) and crabs, while the men, when not harvesting the catch from rock fish traps (ngurruwarra), which are found one every .9 kilometres around Bentinck's coastline, but also along the shores of Sweers islands's calcareous peneplain, foraged more broadly for turtle, sharks, dugong.

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