The Wajarri Language

Wajarri is a Kartu language native to the Midwest of Western Australia, spoken by the Wajarri people. It is the most widely spoken Kartu language today, probably because the various Wajarri groups were the most populous in the entire Midwest prior to European colonisation. In fact, many ethnically Badimaya people now speak Wajarri instead of Badimaya due to its regional dominance. The Mount Magnet District High School, despite being on what it considered Badimaya land, has a Wajarri teacher in its staff and no teachers of Badimaya. Badimaya is only taught occasionally by guest teachers.
Wajarri has less than a dozen fluent speakers today, and its features have visibly declined over the decades due to language loss: Wilfred Douglas in 1981 recorded the presence of bound pronouns and many other interesting grammatical phenomena in Wajarri that have since stopped being used outside of certain phrases. Still, many Wajarri people today have an amount of competency in the language, and passionate community efforts are currently trying to revitalise the language.
Wajarri has (or had) several features characteristic of Kartu languages, including six places of articulation, bound pronouns, and split ergativity.
There are several dialects of Wajarri, which (like all dialects) are ill-defined and possess wibbly-wobbly borders and definitions. According to the Irra-Wangga Language Centre, the dialects of Wajarri include:
  • Birdungu dialect
  • Nharnu dialect
  • Ngunuru dialect
  • Byro dialect (previously known as Nhugarn)
  • Mileura dialect (also known as Muliarra)
  • Southern dialect (deemed the "standard" dialect by linguists and anthropologists)

    • Most of the dialectal differences are lexical.

    Resources

  • Wajarri's Wikipedia article
  • The website of the Irra-Wangga Language Centre, the main group working to preserve Wajarri
  • An online dictionary developed by Irra-Wangga

    • The Irra-Wangga Language Centre sells a number of resources for Wajarri, including the nigh exhaustive Wajarri Dictionary, which also includes a brief description of the language's grammar.
    Another resource is Doug Marmion's 1996 grammar A Description of the Morphology of Wajarri, which is available at AIATSIS.

    Old Resources

    An older resource is the aforementioned 1981 sketch grammar by Wilfred Douglas, which can be found in Volume II of the Handbook of Australian Languages. An important note with this resource is that Douglas fails to recognise Wajarri's phonemic distinction between palatal and interdental consonants, and much of his vocabulary is spelled inaccurately as a result.




    Home