Yolŋu
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Australia | |
| Languages | |
| Yolŋu Matha (Dhaŋu-Djaŋu, Nhaŋu, Dhuwal, Ritharŋu, Djinaŋ, Djinba), Australian English, Yolngu Sign Language | |
| Religion | |
| Traditional religions, Christianity | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Australian Aborigines |
The Yolngu or Yolŋu (IPA: [ˈjoːlŋʊ]) are an aggregation of indigenous Australian people inhabiting north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Yolngu means "person" in the Yolŋu languages. The term Murngin was formerly used by some anthropologists for the Yolngu.
The ethnonym Murrgin gained currency after its extensive use in a book by the American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose study of the Yolngu, A Black Civilization: a Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937) quickly assumed the status of an ethnographical classic, considered by R. Lauriston Sharp the 'first adequately rounded out descriptive picture of an Australian aboriginal community.'Norman Tindale was dismissive of the term, regarding it, like the term Kurnai, as 'artificial,' having been arbitrarily applied to a large number of peoples of northeastern Australia. The proper transliteration of the word was, in any case, Muraŋin, meaning 'shovel-nosed spear folk', an expression appropriate to western peripheral tribes, such as the Rembarrnga of the general area Warner described. For Tindale, following recent linguistic studies, the eastern Arnhem Land tribes constituting the Yolgnu lacked the standard tribal structures evidenced elsewhere in abvoriginal Australia, in comprising several distinct socio-linguistic realities in an otherwise integral cultural continuum. He classified these as the Yan-nhaŋu, Djinang, Djinba, Djaŋu, Dangu, Rembarrnga, Ritharngu, Dhuwal and the Dhuwala.
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