Tiwi language
| Tiwi | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Australia |
| Region | Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory. |
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Native speakers
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1,700 (2006 census) |
| Dialects |
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | tiwi1244 |
| AIATSIS | N20 |
Tiwi (purple), among other non-Pama-Nyungan languages (grey)
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Tiwi /ˈtiːwi/ is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia. It is one of about 10% of Australian languages still being learned by children.
Traditional Tiwi, spoken by people over the age of fifty by 2005, is a polysynthetic language. However, this grammatical complexity has been lost among younger generations. Tiwi has around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated into verbs, most of them quite different from the corresponding free forms.
Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate.
Like most Australian languages, Tiwi has four phonetically distinct series of coronal stops. (See Coronals in Indigenous Australian languages.) There are contrasting alveolar and postalveolar apical consonants, the latter often called retroflex. However, the two laminal series are in complementary distribution, with postalveolar laminal [t̠] (sometimes described as alveolo-palatal) occurring before the front vowel /i/, and denti-alveolar laminal [t̪] occurring before the non-front vowels, /a/, /o/, /u/. That is, phonologically Tiwi has at most three series. However, some analyses treat postalveolar [ʈ] as a sequence /ɻt/, since it only occurs in medial position.
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