Mbabaram people

Mbabaram or Mbabaram, often referred to as the Barbaram people, are an Indigenous Australian people living in Queensland on the rainforests of the Atherton Tableland.

For a long time mystery surrounded the Mbabaram language. The little that was known of it hinted that it might be a language isolate, since it appeared to differ notably from the surrounding languages. In particular its vocabulary was monosyllabic, an anomaly among Australian aboriginal languages. This puzzle contributed to the Barrinean hypothesis, which regarded the Mbabaram people as a reclusive rainforest remnant of an original Negrito population. The mystery was solved, taking a hint from a suggestion from Kenneth Hale, by Robert M. W. Dixon, who discovered that the ostensible differences could be accounted for by noting that Mbabaram words dropped the initial syllable present in contiguous languages, and had developed from a regular Australian language. A phonetic principle outlined by Hale laid down that a second syllable of a Mbabaram word would become o if the original word began with a g. Thus an original guwa (west) would change in Mbabaram to wo, which was indeed their word for 'west'. The word for 'dog' is also in Mbabaram the monosyllabic 'dog', not borrowed from English but, following this rule simply a clipped version of gudaga, the word for the animal in Yidin, which exists also in Dyirbal, though there shortened to guda. With this insight, Mbabaram suddenly appeared no longer aberrant, but perfectly regular as an Australian language.

The Mbarabam people's traditional territory is on the Atherton Tableland, was bounded by the Kuku Yalanji, near Dimbulah to the north, almost to Mareeba, the Dyirbal people to the east and the down to Irvinebank and the Warungu tribal lands to their south. It extends from an area just west of Almaden across Lappa and east to Atherton. Both Norman Tindale and Robert Dixon suggest that at some period in the past, the Mbabaram had moved or been driven out of the rainforest, westwards into scrubland. By the time of Tindale's investigations descendants were living on 'terile and rugged granite ranges.'

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