Wajarri language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wajarri | ||
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Spoken in: | Australia | |
Region: | Murchison area of Western Australia | |
Total speakers: | Possibly 25 | |
Language family: | Australian Pama-Nyungan Southwest Kartu Wajarri |
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Language codes | ||
ISO 639-1: | none | |
ISO 639-2: | aus | |
ISO 639-3: | wbv | |
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
Wajarri is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is one of the Kartu languages of the large South-West branch of the Pama-Nyungan family.
Wajarri country is inland from Geraldton, Western Australia, and extends as far south and west as Mullewa, north to Cascoyne Junction and east to Meekatharra. The Yamaji Language Centre has been carrying out work on the Wajarri language since 1993 and has produced an illustrated wordlist as well as grammatical materials and a dictionary (the latter two unpublished). Sketch grammars of Wajarri have been written by Douglas, published in 1981, and by Marmion in the 1990s (the latter is an unpublished Honors thesis).
People who are Wajarri speakers, or who are descended primarily from Wajarri speakers also refer to themselves as Wajarri. The word for 'man' in Wajarri is yamaji and this word is also commonly used by Wajarri people to refer to themselves. Depending on the context yamaji may also be used to refer to other Aboriginal people, particularly people from the Murchison-Gascoyne region.