Wagiman language

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Wagiman
Spoken in:	Australia
Region:	Northern Territory
Total speakers:	10 (2000)
Language family:	Australian Ginwinyguan Wagiman
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`—`
ISO 639-3:	`waq`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Wagiman is a near-extinct Australian Aboriginal language spoken by less than 10 people in and around Pine Creek, in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory.

1 Introduction
2 Parts of Speech
3 Phonology and Orthography
- 3.1 Consonants
- 3.2 Vowels
4 Syntax
5 Complex Predicates
6 External Link

[edit] Introduction

[edit] Parts of Speech

Wagiman, like many Indigenous Australian languages, differs from the languages of Europe and elsewhere in that verbs are a closed class of word with a small number of members, between 40 and 50. The meanings expressed by this class of word are mostly broad, such as 'do', 'go' and 'be'. Narrower meanings are conveyed instead by coverbs, a class of word that closer resembles verbs in English. Unlike verbs in English however, coverbs may not inflect for person. A finite clause in Wagiman requires a verb. If a coverb is to act as a syntactic head, then it must combine with the verb. The most common combination of verb and coverb is called a Complex Predicate.

[edit] Nominals

Wagiman does not distinguish between nouns and adjectives. They form one word class that is called nominals. Wagiman nominals take case suffixes that denote their grammatical or semantic role in the sentence. The grammatical cases are ergative, absolutive and dative and the semantic cases are instrumental, allative, ablative, locative, comitative, privative, temporal and semblative.

[edit] Verbs

Verbs are a closed class of word in Wagiman which contains fewer than 50 members.

[edit] Coverbs

[edit] Phonology and Orthography

[edit] Consonants

	bilabial	alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	glottal
plosive	pp [p], b [b]	tt [t], d [d]	rt [ʈ], rd [ɖ]	tj [c], j [ɟ]	kk [k], g [g]	h [ʔ]
nasal	m [m]	n [n]	rn [ɳ]	ny [ɲ]	ng [ŋ]
trill		rr [r]
lateral		l [l]	rl [ɭ]
approximant	w [w]		r [ɻ]	y [j]