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Guniyandi language

Aboriginal language of Western Australia

Summary

Aboriginal language of Western Australia

Field	Value
name	Gooniyandi
region	Western Australia
ethnicity	Gooniyandi
speakers
date	2021 census
ref
familycolor	Australian
fam1	Bunuban
script	Latin
iso3	gni
glotto	goon1238
glottorefname	Gooniyandi
aiatsis	K6
glottopedia	Gooniyandi

Gooniyandi is an Australian Aboriginal language now spoken by about 200 people, most of whom live in or near Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia. who instead grow up speaking Kriol.

Classification

Gooniyandi is closely related to Bunuba, to about the same degree as English is related to Dutch. The two are the only members of the Bunuban language family. Unlike the majority of Australian Aboriginal languages, Gooniyandi and Bunuba are non-Pama–Nyungan.

Phonology

Gooniyandi has three vowel sounds: /a, i, u/. /a/ has contrastive vowel length.

Front	Back	High	Low

Peripheral	Laminal	Apical	Labial	Velar	Palatal	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Plosive	Nasal	Tap	Lateral	Approximant

Orthography

A Gooniyandi alphabet based on the Latin script was adopted by the community in 1984, and subsequently revised in 1990 and again in 1999. It is not phonemic, as it omits some distinctions made in speech.

Grammar

Gooniyandi has no genders, but a large number of cases; it uses an ergative-absolutive case system. It is a verb-final language, but without a dominant order between the subject and the object.

Notes

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2021). "Cultural diversity: Census".
"Gooniyandi language, alphabet and pronunciation".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

bunuban-languages kimberley-(western-australia) endangered-indigenous-australian-languages-in-western-australia

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