Bininj Kunwok

Evans (2003), who introduced the cover term Bininj Gun-wok for all dialects, identifies six dialects: Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Gundjeihmi (now Kundjeyhmi Kunwinjku is spoken in the largest population centre, the township of Gunbalanya, and is the most widespread, with an ethnic population of around 900, almost all of whom speak Kunwinjku in spite of increasing exposure to English. Kundjeyhmi is spoken in the central part of Kakadu. , only three of the 12 original languages spoken in the Kakadu area are regularly spoken: Kundjeyhmi, Kunwinjku and Jawoyn. Kundjeyhmi and Kunwinjku are dialects of Bininj Kunwok, while Jawoyn is a separate language spoken in the southern areas. As of June 2015, the Gundjeihmi dialect group officially adopted standard Kunwinjku orthography, meaning it would in future be spelt Kundjeyhmi. ==Phonology==

Bininj Kunwok is typical of the languages of central Arnhem Land (and contrasts with most other Australian languages) in having a phonemic glottal stop, two stop series (short and long), five vowels without a length contrast, relatively complex consonant clusters in codas (though only single-consonant onsets) and no essential distinction between word and syllable phonotactics. The consonant and vowel tables include the standardized pan-dialectal orthography. Consonant inventory Vowel inventory This is an abnormal vowel inventory for one of the Australian Aboriginal languages, as most of them simply have a three-vowel , , system with length distinctions. Bininj Kunwok is unique in that it does not have length distinctions for vowels (despite having them for consonants), and has the mid vowels and as well as the usual three. ==Grammar==

Bininj Kunwok is polysynthetic, with grammatical relations largely encoded within the complex verb. The verb carries obligatory polypersonal agreement, a number of derivational affixes (including benefactive, comitative, reflexive/reciprocal and TAM-morphology) and has an impressive potential for incorporation of both nouns and verbs. The Kunwinjku dialect preserved four noun classes but lost the core case marking on the nouns, and a handful of semantic cases are optional. Kune and Manyallaluk Mayali dialects have an optional ergative marker -yih. Nominals have extensive derivational morphology and compounding. Morphology Morphology is mainly agglutinating, with fusion zones at the edges of the word. Syntax Bininj Kunwok shows syntactic patterns characteristic of 'non-configurational' languages: nominal modifiers can appear without the N head (typical of many Australian languages), there is no rigid order within the 'nominal group', and the distinction between predicative and argumental use of nominals is hard to make. == References ==