Pintupi language

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Pintupi
Spoken in:	Western Australia Northern Territory
Total speakers:	300-400
Language family:	Pama-Nyungan South-West Wati Pintupi
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`aus`
ISO 639-3:	`piu`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Pintupi is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is one of the Wati languages of the large South-West branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It is one of the varieties of the Western Desert Language (WDL).

Pintupi is the name commonly used to refer to a variety of the Western Desert Language spoken by Aboriginal people from the area west of Lake MacDonald and Lake Mackay in Western Australia. These people moved (or were moved) into the Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Haasts Bluff in the west of the Northern Territory in the 1940s-1980s (the last Pintupi people left their traditional lifestyle in the desert in 1984). Over recent decades they have moved back into their traditional country, setting up the communities of Kintore (in Pintupi known as Walungurru) in the Northern Territory, Kiwirrkura and Jupiter Well (in Pintupi Puntutjarrpa) in Western Australia.

Children who were born in Papunya and Haasts Bluff grew up speaking a new variety of Pintupi, now known as Pintupi-Luritja, due to their close contact with speakers of Arrernte, Warlpiri and other varieties of the WDL. This has continued through the moves west so that most Pintupi people today speak Pintupi-Luritja, although there remains a clear distinction between the more western and eastern varieties.