Iwaidja language

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Iwaidja
Spoken in:	Croker Island, Northern Territory
Total speakers:	150
Language family:	Arnhem Land languages Yiwaidjan languages Yiwaidjic Iwaidja
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`aus`
ISO 639-3:	`ibd`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Iwaidja, in phonemic spelling Iwaja, is an Australian language with about 150 speakers in northernmost Australia. Historically from the base of the Cobourg Peninsula, it is now spoken on Croker Island. It is still being learned by children.

1 Phonology
2 Morphophonemics
3 Semantics
4 Reference
5 External links

[edit] Phonology

Iwaidja has three vowels, /a, i, u/, and the following consonants:

	Bilabial	Apical Alveolar	Apical Retroflex	Laminal Postalveolar	Velar
Nasal	m	n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	p	t	ʈ	c	k
Fricative					ɣ
Approximant			ɻ	j	w
Flap			ɽ
Trill		r
Lateral		l	ɭ	(ʎ)
Lateral flap		ɺ	ɺ̡	(ʎ̡)

Note: The postalveolar lateral and lateral flap are rare, and it cannot be ruled out that they are sequences of /lj/ and /ɺj/. The plosives are allophonically voiced, and are often written b d ɖ ɟ ɡ.

[edit] Morphophonemics

Iwaidja has extensive morphophonemic alteration. For example, body parts occur with possessive prefixes, and these alter the first consonant in the root:

ŋa-ɺ̡uli	aŋ-kuli	ɹuli
my foot	your foot	his/her foot

Both the words arm and to be sick originally started with an /m/, as shown in related languages such as Maung. The pronominal prefix for it, its altered the first consonant of the root. In Iwaidja, this form extended to the masculine and feminine, so that gender distinctions were lost, and the prefix disappeared, leaving only the consonant mutation — a situation perhaps unique in Australia, but not unlike that of the Celtic languages.

	arm	to be sick
they	a-mawur "their arms"	a-macu "they're sick"
he/she/it	pawur "his/her arm"	pacu "s/he's sick"

[edit] Semantics

The Iwaidja languages are nearly unique among the languages of the world in using verbs for kin terms. Nouns are used for direct address, but transitive verbs in all other cases. In English something similar is done in special cases: he fathered a child; she mothers him too much. But these do not indicate social relationships in English. For example, he fathered a child says nothing about whether he is the man the child calls "father". An Iwaidja speaker, on the other hand, says I nephew her to mean "she is my aunt". Because these are verbs, they can be inflected for tense. In the case of in-laws, this is equivalent to my ex-wife or the bride-to-be in English. However, with blood relations, past can only mean that the person has died, and future only that they are yet to be born.