Tiwi language

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Tiwi
Spoken in:	Australia
Region:	Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory.
Total speakers:	1,500
Language family:	Australian Tiwian Tiwi
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`aus`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`tiw`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia.

It is polysynthetic, though this grammatical complexity is being lost among the younger generations. According to Dixon (1980) there are around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated, but most of them are quite different from the corresponding free forms.

Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate.

[edit] Bibliography

Osborne, C.R. 1974. The Tiwi language. Canberra: AIAS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies)
R. M. W. Dixon 1980: The languages of Australia (Cambridge language surveys) Cambridge University Press

ISBN 0-521-22329-6 (hard covers) and ISBN 0-521-29450-9 (paperback)