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Dyirbal language
Dyirbal (/ˈdʒɜːrbəl/ JUR-bəl; also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were eight speakers of the language in 2016 and 24 speakers in 2021. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among linguists.
In the years since the Dyirbal grammar by Robert Dixon was published in 1972, Dyirbal has steadily moved closer to extinction as younger community members have failed to learn it.
There are many different groups speaking dialects of Dyirbal language. Researcher Robert Dixon estimates that Dyirbal had, at its peak, 10 dialects.
Dialects include:
The speakers of these dialects largely regard their dialects as different languages. They were classified as dialects by researcher Robert Dixon, who classified them as such based on linguistic criteria and their similarities, some dialects sharing as much as 90% of their vocabularies. Since the dialects were viewed by speakers as different languages, the language had no formal name, so Dixon assigned the language the name Dyirbal, naming it after Jirrbal, which was the dialect with the largest number of speakers at the time he was studying it.
Languages neighbouring the many Dyirbal dialects include:
Dyirbal has only four places of articulation for the stop and nasals, whereas most other Australian Aboriginal languages have five or six. This is because Dyirbal lacks the dental/alveolar/retroflex split typically found in these languages. Like the majority of Australian languages, it does not make a distinction between voiced consonants (⟨b, d, g⟩, etc.) and voiceless consonants (the corresponding ⟨p, t, k⟩, etc.), respectively. Like Pinyin, standard Dyirbal orthography uses voiced consonants, which seem to be preferred by speakers of most Australian languages since the sounds (which can often be semi-voiced) are closer to English semi-voiced ⟨b, d, g⟩ than aspirated ⟨p, t, k⟩.
The Dyirbal vowel system is typical of Australia, with three vowels: /i/, /a/ and /u/, though /u/ is realised as [o] in certain environments and /a/ can be realised as [e], also depending on the environment in which the phoneme appears.[further explanation needed] Thus the actual inventory of sounds is greater than the inventory of phonemes would suggest. Stress always falls on the first syllable of a word and usually on subsequent odd-numbered syllables except the ultima, which is always unstressed. The result of this is that consecutive stressed syllables do not occur.
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Dyirbal language
Dyirbal (/ˈdʒɜːrbəl/ JUR-bəl; also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were eight speakers of the language in 2016 and 24 speakers in 2021. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among linguists.
In the years since the Dyirbal grammar by Robert Dixon was published in 1972, Dyirbal has steadily moved closer to extinction as younger community members have failed to learn it.
There are many different groups speaking dialects of Dyirbal language. Researcher Robert Dixon estimates that Dyirbal had, at its peak, 10 dialects.
Dialects include:
The speakers of these dialects largely regard their dialects as different languages. They were classified as dialects by researcher Robert Dixon, who classified them as such based on linguistic criteria and their similarities, some dialects sharing as much as 90% of their vocabularies. Since the dialects were viewed by speakers as different languages, the language had no formal name, so Dixon assigned the language the name Dyirbal, naming it after Jirrbal, which was the dialect with the largest number of speakers at the time he was studying it.
Languages neighbouring the many Dyirbal dialects include:
Dyirbal has only four places of articulation for the stop and nasals, whereas most other Australian Aboriginal languages have five or six. This is because Dyirbal lacks the dental/alveolar/retroflex split typically found in these languages. Like the majority of Australian languages, it does not make a distinction between voiced consonants (⟨b, d, g⟩, etc.) and voiceless consonants (the corresponding ⟨p, t, k⟩, etc.), respectively. Like Pinyin, standard Dyirbal orthography uses voiced consonants, which seem to be preferred by speakers of most Australian languages since the sounds (which can often be semi-voiced) are closer to English semi-voiced ⟨b, d, g⟩ than aspirated ⟨p, t, k⟩.
The Dyirbal vowel system is typical of Australia, with three vowels: /i/, /a/ and /u/, though /u/ is realised as [o] in certain environments and /a/ can be realised as [e], also depending on the environment in which the phoneme appears.[further explanation needed] Thus the actual inventory of sounds is greater than the inventory of phonemes would suggest. Stress always falls on the first syllable of a word and usually on subsequent odd-numbered syllables except the ultima, which is always unstressed. The result of this is that consecutive stressed syllables do not occur.