Murrinh-patha language
| Murrinh-patha | |
|---|---|
| Region | Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia |
| Ethnicity | Murrinh-Patha |
|
Native speakers
|
1,200 (2005) to 1,800 (2006 census) |
|
Southern Daly?
|
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | murr1258 |
| AIATSIS | N3 |
Murrinh-patha (literally "language-good"), called Garama by the Jaminjung, is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by over 2,500 people, most of whom live in Wadeye in the Northern Territory, where it is the dominant language of the community. It is spoken by the Murrinh-Patha people, as well as several other peoples whose languages are extinct or nearly so, including the Mati Ke and Marri-Djabin.
Murrinh-patha can also be spelled Murrinh Patha, Murrinh-Patha, Murinbada, Murinbata, and Garama.Garama is the Jaminjung name for the language and its speakers. Murrinh-patha literally means "language-good."
There are three similar dialects of the Murrinh-Patha language, namely Murrinhdiminin, Murrinhkura, and Murrinhpatha.
For the Murrinh-Patha speakers, their language is more than a set of rules and a specific grammar. It is very closely tied with or determines for them their land, identity, associations and relation to the surrounding.
Because of its role as the lingua franca in the region, Murrinh-patha is one of the few Australian Aboriginal languages whose number of speakers has increased and whose usage has expanded over the past generation. Unlike many indigenous languages (particularly those of eastern Australia), children are actively acquiring the language and there is a language dictionary and grammar, and there have been portions of the Bible published in Murrinh-Patha from 1982-1990. This renders Murrinh-patha one of Australia's few indigenous languages that is not endangered. Additionally, Murrinh-Patha is taught in schools and all locals are encouraged to learn it due to the wide range of use and functions of the language locally.
Murrinh-Patha was once thought to be a language isolate, based on comparisons of lexical data: at most 11% of its vocabulary is shared with any other language it has been tested against. However, its verbal inflections correspond closely to those of another language, Ngan’gityemerri (Ngan’gi). Green (2003) makes a case that the formal correspondences in core morphological sequences of the finite verbs of the two languages are too similar (in their complexities and their irregularities) to have come about through anything other than shared descent from a common parent language; the two languages make up the Southern Daly language family. Nonetheless, other than having cognates in their finite-verb morphology and in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi), they have little vocabulary in common, though their grammatical structures are very similar. It is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.
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