Distribution of Aboriginal toponymic suffixes in modern WA place names
Here's a map I made of Indigenous-derived toponymic suffixes in Western Australian town and station names. If a town or station did not seem to end in one of the many suffixes I picked out, I didn't put it on the map.
The map is impressionistic: in other words, I didn't actually do any research for this. I just looked at the ends of town names, and if they ended the same, I said they shared a suffix. This is a very unscientific method, but you can clearly see a few divisions that I think reflect the fact that my terrible method has worked a little bit.
In case you're not Australian, here's a quick explanation: the majority of places in Australia retain their precolonial Aboriginal names. However, for most of these town names, there has been some bastardisation of their original forms during their being loaned into English. To add to that, many of the languages which these terms came from have been lost, and most places' names have had their original meanings lost to time.
As you can see, the known Noongar toponymic suffixes of "-up" and "-ing" are bound strictly to that area of the southwest which the Noongar are known to have inhabited.
Other patterns are less distinct: the Kartu suffixes of gabi and -(b)aba are restricted to the areas where Kartu languages were spoken, and preserved in toponyms like Yoweragabbie and Yarrabubba respectively. The same goes for the seemingly Kartu suffix -wa (pronounced /wɔː/), as in Morawa, and -nyu, as in Mingenew and Dalwallinu. A suffix I found, which was surprisingly restricted to only a small pocket of land within the Coastal language group, was -nooka. For some reason, I thought this was a southern suffix. Ah well.
The common Western Australian toponymic suffix -arra (preceded by various consonants), as in Meekatharra and Yakenyarra doesn't seem to follow the distribution of any one language, much to my surprise. The same goes for the similarly widespread -na (as in Wiluna), -la (as in Mundrabillah), and -nga (as in Madoonga), the latter two of which I chose to look for because I know them as locative suffixes in the Kartu languages. These three having a wide distribution doesn't surprise me, as Westralian languages tend to be fairly consistent in their grammatical suffixes, especially south of the Kimberley (north of the Kimberley is where you start to find languages that are, debatably, not even Pama-Nyungan at all!).
So really, all that this map clearly shows is the language barrier which seperates the southwest of Western Australia from the rest of the state. This makes sense, because this linguistic and cultural division is one of the most well-pronounced in the state. Hard territorial borders didn't exist in precolonial Australia, and so the distribution and boundaries between Aboriginal cultures before colonisation is almost impossible to accurately reconstruct. However, the boundary which seperates the southwest of Australia from its surroundings is a notable exception. This was not only a linguistic boundary, but a tribal and cultural one as well. The source of the separation seems to have been differences in male initiation rituals: namely, if genital mutilation was performed. In the southwest, circumcision and subincision were not practiced. However, outside of that border, they were a normal part of initiation. We can tell that this difference in initiation was significant not just because it reflects cultural and linguistic boundaries, but also because tensions between either side of the boundary have been directly attested. In his 1974 work Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Norman Tindale wrote: "The Ngadjunmaia are known to the southwestern uncircumcised tribes as Wanggara, a term that has a derogatory significance based on the fancied resemblance of their mutilated organs to the beaks of ducks." If you want to learn more about the significance of this boundary, look up "Western Australia subincision boundary" on Google Scholar. I ain't got time to redirect you to proper sources, I have to go to rehearsal.
Anyway, that's my map. I made it in two days, the 26th and 27th of February, and it's got 202 places on it. The number two seems to have some sort of cosmic significance right now, but it's lost on me. Maybe I've got two days left to live. Maybe the bus leaves in two minutes. It does. Gotta go. By e
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