Uw Oykangand people
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Australia | |
| Languages | |
| Uw Oykangand, English | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Yir-Yoront, Yirrk-Thangalkl, Koko Bera, Thaayorre, Uw Olkola |
The Uw Oykangand are an Indigenous Australian people living on the southwestern part of the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland in Australia. Their neighbours to the northwest are the Yir-Yoront, Their traditional lands are around the Alice River and the Crosbie River, and further west around the Mitchell River and into Gulf Country.
The Uw Oykangand language is, together with its close dialect relative Uw Olkola, a member of the Kunjen branch of the Pama-Nyungan language family. It has a notable characteristic of maintaining a thorough distinction between the standard content forms of the language and those used in contexts where respect is demanded, such as speaking to those who have kinship relations with one's mother-in-law. Tne register of respect changes nouns and verbs, for example, while leaving unaltered words that have a purely grammatical function. Bruce Sommer has argued that this together with other Kunjen languages is an exception to the principle advanced by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle in 1956 according to which consonant +vowel is a universal syllable pattern.
The Alice-Palmer-Mitchell river system was situated in wide savannah plains, tropical forest and rich wetlands providing a rich diversity of food and before European settlement was one of the most densely populated areas of the Australian continent.
In the dreamtime narrative, the pathways the ancestral beings wriggled over as they moved across the landscape met at the junction of the Mitchell and Alice rivers. The Kunjen hold that the watercourses themselves were fashioned in this way by 'rainbows' or snake beings: thus the Inh-Elar (night pigeon) followed in the wake of the Ewarr (Rainbow) as it ploughed through tree roots, so that water bubbled forth until the Rainbow rested and opened its dillybag, releasing flying foxes, whose existence was thereby esrtablished.
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