Aboriginal Languages Australia

Daisy Bates provided the following sentence, with general and literal translations: dajä wâ gäbälä? Any fish in the river (or water)?...

The word for ‘heart’ is gurd. By extension, gurd is also used for someone loved: With the possessive suffix -ag to yield ‘heart-of’, the...

Lewis Jetta of the Sydney Swans celebrates his goal with an Indigenous Dance during the 2015 AFL round 17 match between the West Coast...

The sky darkens. There is a heaviness in the air. It feels damp. The clouds are massing. Then the rumbling of thunder starts and it...

barang crops up a lot. It seems to mean ‘carry’, ‘bring’ and the like. But is is also used in combinations, where it seems to have the...

WIALKI “Latitude 30° 29′ S Longitude 118° 07′ E The townsite of Wialki is … 341 km north east of Perth and 25 km east of Beacon. … Wialki...

The most common Nyungar word for ‘dog’ is durda: There were various spellings: Some recorders did not hear, or note, the ‘r’ sound: What...

What can ‘nest’, ‘barb’, ‘spear’, ‘leaf’, ‘hair’ and ‘shoulder’ have to do with one another? They all appear to be linked through manga /...

It often happens that a word appears in a list, with alongside it a simple translation, such as windu: ‘old’ There being several...

A large number of Nyungar words end in -gur but no common thread jumps out to suggest a meaning. gur also occurs on its own, as does the...

On p. 283 of A Nyoongar Wordlist from the Southwest of Western Australia (Bindon and Chadwick, 1992) there is an entry of which the...

yuda occurs in all the following expressions connected with flowering plants: From this is would seem the best interpretation of yuda is...

English commonly has specific words to express shades of meaning. It has, for example, endless words for colour names: not only ‘red’ but...

high/deep hard/firm bald rat young night There seem to be two distinct concepts here, one or the other possibly underlying several of the...

dog / wild / bad / turtle / arouse/ alarm /startle / disturb / drive / chase SPELLING From the above record extracts it would seem that...

bidya: ‘sleep’ and bidyag: ‘stinking’ — is there a connection? and if so, what? The suffix -ak [-ag] is the possessive. Thus bidya-[a]g...

There are several words to express ‘bad’, but it is interesting to note one similarity between the Nyungar language of south-west Western...

In 2010 I have been working on the Nyungar language area of south-west Western Australia. I used to live in Darlington not far from...

Not surprisingly, no-one has found the Naabawinya site so far, but perhaps this will change. I have put into modest circulation some...

I have an interest in the Sydney Aboriginal Language. I wrote a 16-page ‘Tourist’s Guide’ to it. I would like to put it here, but have...