The Malgana Language

Malgana is/was a Kartu language native to Shark Bay in Western Australia, spoken by the Malgana people. It is moribund, if not extinct: Andrew Gargett declared in his 2011 salvage grammar of the language, "There are no longer any speakers of the West Australian Aboriginal language Malgana who have any degree of fluency." It was relatively similar to the other Kartu languages: evidence shows that it had six places of articulation, that it may have once had bound pronouns, and that it likely had split ergativity.

Verbal Morphology


My favourite thing about the language is the unique verbal morphology. The Malgana future tense is cognate to the Wajarri present tense (compare Malgana bajanmanha "will bite" with Wajarri bajarnmanha "biting"), whereas the new present tense seems to be completely innovated from the verb for "sit", nyina. Central/northern Badimaya, interestingly, uses the same word as an auxiliary verb in past imperfective constructions:

Ngalidya yuga-∅ nyina-ng wadyan-∅ nha-ng barrba-n.
2du.nom stand-PRS sit-PST fire-ACC see-PST light.up-PST
You two were standing and saw the fire blaze.

James Bednall writes in Lexical and Morphosyntactic Variation in Badimaya, "It is not uncommon in the literature on Australian languages to find examples of motion or stance verbs (often ‘to sit’) that are grammaticised to form an auxiliary conveying an aspectually continuous verb form. The development of ‘to sit’ as a compounding or an auxiliary verb can be observed, for example, in Diyari and Ngamini, once spoken in the far north-east of South Australia (see Austin 1981), and Yankunytajtara from central Australia (Goddard 1985) (Austin 1998, p. 30)." It looks like Malgana developed this kind of thing for continuous/present tense actions, and then eventually the word became a suffix, and became a new past tense, with the old past tense being transformed into future tense.

Resources

Andrew Gargett's 2011 grammar can be found here.

Old Resources

  • Frederick Barlee's 1886 wordlist