Yukulta language

The Yukulta language, also spelt Yugulda, Yokula, Yukala, Jugula, and Jakula, and also known as Ganggalidda (Kangkalita, Ganggalida), is a Tangkic language spoken in Queensland and Northern Territory, Australia. It was spoken by the Yukulta people, whose traditional lands lie on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Nguburinji (Ngubirindi) is regarded as a dialect of the same language, spoken by the Nguburinji people. It is now extinct.

Yukulta is a member of the Tangkic language group, along with Kayardild, Lardil and Yangkaal, all from the North Wellesley Islands and adjoining mainland. The languages are mutually intelligible, and tangka means "person" in all four languages). These languages were classified as Tangkic by Geoffrey O'Grady, with Carl and Flo Voegelin(1966).

Nicholas Evans and Gavan Breen see Yukulta and Nguburinji as dialects of the same language. Nguburinji is known only through a word list by Walter Roth (1897), which shares 90 per cent of its vocabulary with present-day Yukulta.

It is not clear if the two rhotics are trill and flap, or flap and approximant.

Yukulta has three vowels, each with a long and short variant: a, i, and u.

There are many different rules governing what happens to each Yukulta phoneme in any given environment, so most morphemes have at least two allomorphs.

All Yukulta nouns and adjectives consist of a root and an inflectional ending. Nouns and the adjectives that go along with them have to agree in their endings. Yukulta nominals can take five case-endings: absolutive, ergative/locative, dative, ablative and allative. As in Kayardild, each morphological ending can be realized as various allomorphs, depending on the phonological environment. There can be many versions of any given morpheme. The absolutive marker, for instance, can be realized as any of eight allomorphs.