The Badimaya Language

This is where I'm gonna put info relating to the Badimaya language.

Language information

Badimaya is a Kartu language native to the Midwest of Western Australia, spoken by the Badimaya people.
The Badimaya people are still found all over the midwest today, mostly in rural towns. Their traditional lifestyle was largely nomadic: they were not bread-makers, like their northern neighbours, and got most of their diet from hunting and gathering. They would travel great distances through different parts of the year (sometimes travelling as far west as the Indian Ocean), and many spoke the languages of their neighbours (the late Ollie George, as well as being the last native speaker of Badimaya, was also able to speak a little bit of Wangkatha in his later years, despite presumably not having spoken it for a long time. He told stories in Nganang Badimaya Wangga which demonstrate he once could hold conversations and tell jokes in Wangkatha).
Their land, like that of all Aboriginal Australian mobs, is impossible to define with solid borders. The Badimaya were a largely nomadic people in precolonial times, and though they certainly had a region in which they tended to roam, their traditional lands are impossible to precisely define and map. Still, the general consensus is that their northern border was roughly around Mount Magnet and Yalgoo; that their southern border was around Paynes Find and Mongers Lake; that their western border was somewhere in the vicinity of Mullewa and Morawa; and that their western border was in the vicinity of Paynes Find and Sandstone.
The Badimaya language itself is decidedly a Kartu language, and visibly very closely-related to Wajarri, though its vocabulary holds many loanwords from the Western Desert dialects which border it to the immediate east. Badimaya has several features characteristic of Kartu languages, including six places of articulation and split ergativity. There is no evidence of it having bound pronouns - however, it's not clear whether it never had them, or if it had simply lost them by the time linguists first studied it in the 1980's.
Despite Badimaya people being widespread across Western Australia, there are no remaining fluent speakers of their language. However, there are still learners of the language (including myself) at least two of which have reached a basic conversational level. Thus, the language is currently considered moribund. There are efforts in development within the Badimaya community to start teaching the language to the community, including the under-construction website linked below. The language will ever return to its former glory, but I have faith that the community will be able to reclaim their language and bring it back into daily life over the course of the coming years.
Badimaya has two dialects: the southern dialect, spoken in the vicinity of Paynes Find; and the northern/central dialect, spoken in the territory north of there. The main differences are in vocabulary: the northern dialect has many more loanwords from Wajarri, and the southern dialect has marginally more loanwords from Noongar dialects and Western Desert dialects. There are also small differences in grammar: for example, in the southern dialect only the head of a phrase recieves case marking (with exceptions made for emphasis); whereas in the northern/central dialect, case marking is applied everywhere that it is applicable. In this regard, the northern/central dialect is more conservative. Potentially the aspect in which the dialects differ most is in their case markings - many northern/central case markings are different from their southern equivalents, with some apparently being loaned from Wajarri, or at the very least related. In this regard, the southern dialect seems to be more conservative, though in truth it's difficult to tell which paradigm is closest to the "original".

Resources

If you want to learn more about Badimaya from proper sources, consider:

Badimaya's Wikipedia article

The website of the Irra Wangga Language Centre, the main group working to preserve Badimaya

The website of the current leading linguist in Badimaya research (a title soon to be transferred to me...>:з)

An under-construction website for learning Badimaya

The Irra Wangga Centre sells a number of resources for the Badimaya language, including The Badimaya Dictionary (which includes a brief description of Badimaya grammar), Badimaya Guwaga (a short learner's book full of words and phrases), and Nganang Badimaya Wangga (a collection of stories from Ollie George, told in a combination of Badimaya and English).
James Bednall also wrote Lexical and morphosyntactic variation in Badimaya, which was the first paper discussing the differences between the northern/central and southern dialects of Badimaya.

Older Resources

One older resource is Leone Dunn's 1988 sketch grammar, which describes the southern dialect of Badimaya. There are plenty of mistakes (apparently because of how rushed the grammar was), the biggest being that Dunn mistakenly asserts that some Badimaya verbs make a past/non-past distinction, whereas others make a full past/present/future distinction. James Bednall has since demonstrated that this is incorrect, and in these cases Dunn was simply misidentifying the present tense as the past tense (or something along those lines).
Another old (and thus, probably less reliable) resource is Daniel Davidson's 1932 comparative wordlist of 19 Westralian languages, one of which is Badimaya. I have summarised the Badimaya parts of this wordlist here.

Note about the Irra Wangga Language Centre

PLEASE ONLY CONTACT THE IRRA WANGGA LANGUAGE CENTRE IF YOU REALLY NEED IT. They are a small team, whose resources and time are stretched thin. If you are a person of Badimaya heritage, or a scientist studying Badimaya, then these are the people to go to. BUT if you are just curious, please please please don't bother them. Their purpose, first and foremost, is to serve the Aboriginal communities who spoke these languages. If people from faraway lands who have nothing to offer to the communities start to swamp the language centre with emails and such, it will only slow down their work and ultimately harm the largely disadvantaged and oppressed people whom the centre is trying to help. If you have a question about Badimaya specifically, I would reccomend you just email me, and I'll try my best to answer your question. I would reccomend that you only reach out to Irra Wangga if you 1) are a member of a community they serve, 2) are a legitimate researcher looking for information on the languages they serve, or 3) are inquiring about their paid services and resources.

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