Uw Oykangand

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Uw Oykangand is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in southern Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland. The traditional land of the Uw Oykangand clans is concentrated around the Alice and Crosbie Rivers and further west around the Mitchell River into the Gulf Country.

Today Uw Oykangand speakers live in Kowanyama, an Aboriginal community in the Gulf country on the Mitchell River. Uw Oykangand people at Kowanyama are establishing a permanent outstation on traditional land at Oriners Station. They continue to make extensive use of the land for camping and subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering edible plant food stuffs. They also harvest the land for traditional industry.

The Aboriginal languages of Cape York Peninsula are all closely related, belonging to the Paman sub-group of the widespread Pama-Nyungan family. Uw Oykangand has a sister dialect, Uw Olkola. They are very similar and mutually intelligible, with 97% cognacy in core vocabulary.^[1] Uw Olkola and Uw Oykangand are clearly distinct from the neighbouring languages they appear to be most closely related to: Kuuk Thaayorre, Kok Kaper, Yir Yoront, Yirrk Thangalkl, and Ogh Unyjan.

1 Phonology
- 1.1 Vowels
- 1.2 Consonants
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Phonology

Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See Help:IPA for a pronunciation key.

In the following tables of the Uw Oykangand sound system, symbols in boldface give the practical orthography. Phonetic values in IPA are shown in [square brackets].

[edit] Vowels

	front	central	back
close	i [i]		u [u]
mid	e [e]		o [o]
open		a [a]

Uw Oykangand has a standard five-vowel system.

[edit] Consonants

	bilabial	lamino-dental	apico-alveolar	retroflex	lamino-alveopalatal	velar
voiceless stop	p [p]	th [t̪]	t [t]		ch [c]	k [k]
voiced stop	b [b]	dh [d̪]	d [d]		j [ɟ]	g [ɡ]
nasal	m [m]	nh [n̪]	n [n]		ny [ɲ]	ng [ŋ]
pre-stopped nasal	bm [^bm]	dnh [^d̪n̪]	dn [^dn]		jny [^ɟɲ]	gng [^ɡŋ]
trill			rr [r]
lateral			l [l]		ly [ʎ]
approximant				r [ɻ]	y [j]	w [w]

As shown in the chart, Uw Oykangand distinguishes five positions of articulation, and has oral and nasal stops at each position. The oral stops have a phonemic voice distinction.^[2]