Kunjen | ||||
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Oykangand | ||||
Spoken in | Australia | |||
Region | Cape York Peninsula, Queensland | |||
Native speakers | 20 (1991) | |||
Language family | ||||
Dialects |
Uw Oykangand
Uw Olkola
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Language codes | ||||
ISO 639-3 | kjn | |||
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Kunjen is a Paman language spoken on the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia, by the Uw Olkola and Uw Oykangand people. The two dialects, Uw Olkola and Uw Oykangand, are very close, being mutually intelligible and sharing 97% of their core vocabulary.[1]
A small dictionary of Kunjen has been compiled by Philip Hamilton.[2]
Contents |
As in many other Australian languages, such as Dyirbal, Kunjen also has a respect register, which is a polite way of speaking with a potential mother-in-law and is called Olkel-Ilmbanhthi. Most of the vocabulary is replaced, while affixes and function words are kept.[3]
The sentence below is in normal Uw Oykangand:
The equivalent in Olkel-Ilmbanhthi is:
Kunjen has 5 vowels:
Front | Back | |
---|---|---|
Unrounded | Rounded | |
Close | i | u |
Mid | e | o |
Open | a |
There is a lexical vowel harmony constraint in Kunjen: Close and mid vowels do not co-occur in a word.
Kunjen has 27 consonants:
Peripheral | Laminal | Apical | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bilabial | Velar | Palatal | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | ||
Plosive | Voiceless | p /p/ | k /k/ | ch /c/ | th /t̪/ | t /t/ | |
Voiced | b /b/ | g /g/ | j /ɟ/ | dh /d̪/ | d /d/ | ||
Nasal | Plain | m /m/ | ng /ŋ/ | ny /ɲ/ | nh /n̪/ | n /n/ | |
Prestopped | bm /ᵇm/ | gng /ᶢŋ/ | jny /ᶡɲ/ | dnh /ᵈ̪n̪/ | dn /ᵈn/ | ||
Trill | rr /r/ | ||||||
Approximant | Central | w /w/ | y /j/ | r /ɻ/ | |||
Lateral | ly /ʎ/ | lh /l̪/ | l /l/ |