Marra, sometimes formerly spelt Mara, is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper, Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Borroloola and Minyerri.

Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction. It is characterized by an intricate aspectual system, elaborate kin terms, no definite structure for relative clause construction, and a complex demonstrative system. Unlike many languages in the area, it has little avoidance language and no difference in the speech of male and female speakers.

Marra is a member of the Arnhem family, the second-largest Australian language family after Pama–Nyungan. The Marra people refer to themselves as Marranbala or Marra, and their language as Marra. In addition to Warndarrang, which was spoken to the north of Marra along the Roper River, Marra was also in contact with Alawa (spoken inland, to the west), Binbinga and Wilangarra (West Barkly languages to the south), and Yanyuwa (a Pama–Nyungan language to the southeast).

The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia): burdal, murrungun, and mambali. In the 1970s, when the first serious fieldwork was being done on Marra, the mambali clan was extinct, though a family with the surname Riley of the burdal clan and a man by the name of Anday of the murrungun clan were able to provide the linguist Jeffrey Heath with cultural and linguistic information.

The three clans, together with the Warndarrang-speaking guyal group, made up a set of four patrilineal semimoieties, each of which had their own set of songs, myths, and rituals. Each semimoiety was also associated with a totem (olive python or fork-tailed catfish for mambali, goanna for guyal, black-headed python or antilopine kangaroo for burdal, and king brown snake for murrungun) and had responsibilities for that totem. Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names mambali, murrungun, wurdal, and guyal (wuyal).

In the years 1973–1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary. With the help of four principal informants – Mack Riley, Tom Riley, Johnnie (who was Warndarrang but spoke Marra and Nunggubuyu for most of his life), and Anday – Heath was able to collect grammar and vocabulary information as well as extensive texts on clan songs and totem rituals.

(All grammatical information from Heath 1981 unless otherwise noted.)

Marra has a consonant inventory nearly identical to those of Warndarrang and Alawa. There are two additional phonemes: the interdental /n̪/ and /l̪/ which occur only in a few flora-fauna terms, and are likely loanwords from either Nunggubuyu or Yanyuwa, both of which languages use these phonemes frequently.