Murrinh-patha language

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Murrinh-patha
Spoken in:	Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia
Total speakers:	Over 1,500
Language family:	Daly Murrinh-pathan Murrinh-patha
Writing system:	Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`aus`
ISO 639-3:	`mwf`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Murrinh-patha (literally "language-good"), sometimes also called Garama, is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by over 1,500 people, most of whom live in Wadeye in the Northern Territory, where it is the dominant language of the community. It is spoken by people of the Murrinh-Patha group, as well as several other groups whose languages are extinct or nearly so, including the Mati Ke and Marri-Djabin. Because of its role as the lingua franca in the region, It is one of few Australian Aboriginal languages whose speakers have increased over the past generation.^[1]

The Murrinh-Patha language displays extensive classifications both of nouns and verbs. Nouns are divided into ten classes or genders along roughly semantic lines, with some exceptions. Each noun class is associated with particles which must agree with the class. Verbs occur in some 35 different conjugations. Each verb is morphologically complex, with the verb root surrounded by prefixes and suffixes identifying subject, object, tense, and mood; these affixes are different in the different conjugations.

[edit] References

Street, C. S. (1987). An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Murrinh-Patha. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Walsh, M. (1976). "The Murinypata language of north-west Australia". . Australian National University
Walsh, M. (1976). "Ergative, locative and instrumental case inflections: Murinjpata", in R. M. W. Dixon: Grammatical categories in Australian languages. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 405–408.
Walsh, M. (1995). "Body parts in Murrinh-Patha: incorporation, grammar and metaphor", in H. Chappell and W. B. McGregor: The Grammar of Inalienability: A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part-Whole Relation. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 327–380.
Walsh, M. (1996). "Vouns and nerbs: a category squish in Murrinh-Patha (Northern Australia)", in W. B. McGregor: Studies in Kimberley Languages in Honour of Howard Coate. Munich and Newcastle: Lincom Europa, 227–252.
Walsh, M. (1997). "Noun classes, nominal classification and generics in Murrinhpatha", in M. Harvey and N. Reid: Nominal Classification in Aboriginal Australia. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 255–292.