Darkinjung language

The name of the language has various spellings as recorded by both Mathews and W.J. Enright, among others, who worked of documentation from the 19th century: • Darkinjang (Tindale 1974) • Darkinjung • Darkiñung (Mathews 1903) • Darrkinyung • Darginjang • Darginyung • Darkinung • Darkinoong • Darknüng • Darkinyung == Revitalisation effort ==

Since 2003 there has been a movement from the Darkinyung language group to revitalise the language. They started working with the original field reports of Robert H. Mathews and W. J. Enright. Where there were gaps in the sparsely populated wordlists, words were taken from lexically similar nearby languages. This led to the publication of the work Darkinyung grammar and dictionary: revitalising a language from historical sources. This may be ordered from the publisher, Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative. == Phonology ==

Much of our understanding of Darkinjung phonology comes from papers published by R.H. Mathews in 1903. When analysing these sources, we may generalise that there were around 15 consonant phonemes, and approximately 3 vowels. Consonants In Darkinjung, like many Australian languages, b, d, and g are interchangeable with p, t, and k and will not change the meaning of the word. The fact that this table shows b, d, and g is arbitrary. Vowels == Morphology ==

"Tags" Darkinjung makes use of what Mathews refers to as "tags," or suffixes to denote relationships between objects in sentences. Number tags -bula "two" and -biyn "several" {{interlinear|indent=2 Possessor Tag: -gayi {{interlinear|indent=2 Locative "at, on, in" tags: -a/ -da/ -dja/ -ga/ -wa The locative tags -ga and -wa appear to be found after stems ending in vowels. {{interlinear|indent=2 Words with locational information seem to coincide with nouns that also carry a locative tag: {{interlinear|indent=2 Ergative case tags: -a/ -da/ -ga/ -ya. Words that end in the consonant ŋ receive that tag /-ga/ {{interlinear|indent=2 == References ==