Marrku–Wurrugu languages
The Marrku–Wurrugu languages are a possible language family of Australian Aboriginal languages spoken in the Cobourg Peninsula region of Western Arnhem Land. They are Marrgu, with one remaining speaker as of 2011, and the extinct Wurrugu.[2] Once classified as distant relatives of the other Iwaidjan languages, Nicholas Evans found the evidence for Marrgu's membership insufficient, concluding that similarities were due to borrowing (including of verbal paradigms).[3]
| Marrku–Wurrugu | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Cobourg Peninsula region and Croker Island, Northern Territory |
| Linguistic classification | no demonstrable relatives |
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | marr1257[1] |
The genetic grouping of Marrgu and Wurrugu is supported by the following observations:[2]
- Despite being geographically separated by the Garig-Ilgar languages, they share a relatively high cognacy rate (15 out of 43 words = ~35%).
- Both languages contain an interdental phoneme [dh], which is absent in the surrounding Iwaidjan languages.
References
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Marrku–Wurrugu". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- Evans, N. (1996). "First and last notes on Wurrugu." University of Melbourne Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 91–97
- Nicholas Evans (2016). 1. As intimate as it gets? Paradigm borrowing in Marrku and its implications for the emergence of mixed languages. In Felicity Meakins, Carmel O'Shannessy (Eds.), Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonisation (pp. 29–56). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
| English varieties | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Major indigenous languages |
| ||||
| Pidgins, creoles and mixed languages | |||||
| Sign languages | |||||
.svg.png){kind=small}
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.