Nyulnyulan languages
Encyclopedia
The Nyulnyulan languages are a small family
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 of closely related Australian Aboriginal languages
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to the Australian Aborigines of Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding the languages of Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islanders...

 spoken in northern Australia.

The languages form two branches established on the basis of lexical and morphological innovation.
  • Western or Nyulnyulic:
Nyulnyul, Bardi
Bardi language
Bardi is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language. There are approximately 20 speakers out of an ethnic population of 380.-Classification:...

–Djawi, Dyaberdyaber, Nimanburru
Nimanburru language
Nimanburru is a Western Nyulnyulan language formerly spoken on the eastern shore of the Dampier Peninsula in North-West Australia. There are no publications on the language, but archival records exist in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies....

  • Eastern or Dyukun:
Jukun, Yawuru
Yawuru language
Yawuru is a Western Nyulnyulan language formerly spoken on the coast south of Broome in Western Australia.Variants of the name include Yawjibara , Yaudjibaia , Jawadjag, and Winjawindjagu....

, Warrwa
Warrwa language
The Warrwa language are an extinct Australian Aboriginal language which was formerly spoken in Western Australia. It was also known as Warrawai or Warwa.Specifically, it was spoken in the Derby Region of Western Australia near Broome....

, Nyigina


R. M. W. Dixon
R. M. W. Dixon
Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland, and formerly Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.In 1996, Dixon and another linguist, Alexandra Aikhenvald,...

accepts the validity of the family but incorrectly gives the subgroups as languages; he thus assigns only two languages to the family despite mutual unintelligibility within the Eastern and Western groups.
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