Pitjantjatjara dialect

There are slightly different standardised spellings used in the Northern Territory and Western Australia compared to South Australia, for example with the first two writing ⟨w⟩ between ⟨a⟩ and ⟨u⟩ combinations and a ⟨y⟩ between ⟨a⟩ and ⟨i⟩, which SA does not use.

Pitjantjatjara has the following consonant inventory, written as shown in bold:[7]

Pitjantjatjara has three vowels:[9]

Pitjantjatjara vowels have a length contrast, indicated by writing them doubled. A colon ⟨:⟩ used to be sometimes used to indicate long vowels: ⟨a:⟩, ⟨i:⟩, ⟨u:⟩.

Pitjantjatjara orthography includes the following underlined letters, which can be either ordinary letters with underline formatting, or Unicode characters which include a line below:

• Ḻ: unicode 1E3A
• ḻ: unicode 1E3B
• Ṉ: unicode 1E48
• ṉ: unicode 1E49
• Ṟ: unicode 1E5E
• ṟ: unicode 1E5F
• Ṯ: unicode 1E6E
• ṯ: unicode 1E6F

The underline represents that the consonant in question is retroflex, rather than alveolar.

Some features distinctive to the Pitjantjatjara dialect, as opposed to other Western Desert Language dialects, include -pa endings to words that simply end in a consonant in other dialects (this is reflective of a general aversion in Pitjantjatjara to words ending with a consonant), and a reluctance to have y at the beginning of words.

The Ernabella Mission was established by Charles Duguid and the Presbyterian Church of Australia in 1937 at the location now known as Pukatja, supported by the South Australian government. The Mission aimed to keep the language and culture alive, with the missionaries learning the language themselves and teaching it in the school as well as delivering sermons in it. This meant that the language became a written language for the first time, and the people became literate in their own language before English.[13][14]

The Pitjantjatjara word ngangkari, added to the Macquarie Dictionary in 2019 and defined as an Indigenous practitioner of bush medicine, was short-listed for the 2019 Word of the Year.[18]

• Bauer, Laurie (2007), The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0748631607
• Bowe, Heather (1990), Categories, Constituents, and Constituent Order in Pitjantjatjara, An Aboriginal Language of Australia, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-05694-2
• Goddard, Cliff (1985), A Grammar of Yankunytjatjara, Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, ISBN 0-949659-32-0
• Goddard, Cliff (1996), Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara to English Dictionary, Alice Springs: IAD Press, ISBN 0-949659-91-6
• Issacs, Jennifer (1980), Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, Sydney: Lansdowne Press, ISBN 0-7018-1330-X, OCLC 6578832
• Rose, David (2001), The Western Desert Code: an Australian cryptogrammar, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, ISBN 085883-437-5
• Tabain, Marija; Butcher, Andrew, "Pitjantjatjara", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 44 (2): 189–200, doi:10.1017/s0025100314000073

• Langlois, Annie (2004). Alive and Kicking: Areyonga Teenage Pitjantjatjara, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. ISBN 0-85883-546-0
• "Pitjantjatjara". Omniglot: The online encyclopaedia of writing systems and languages.
• Pybus, Carol (2015). ""We Grew up this Place": Ernabella Mission 1937-1974" (PDF). The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia. 6 (1). Retrieved 11 July 2019.
• Tabain, Marija; Butcher, Andrew, "Stop Bursts in Pitjantjatjara", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 45 (2): 149–176, doi:10.1017/s0025100315000110
• Trudinger, David (2007). "The language(s) of love: JRB love and contesting tongues at Ernabella Mission Station, 1940-46" (PDF). Aboriginal History. 31: 27–44.
• "Western Desert Special Speech Styles Project". Endangered Languages Archive, SOAS.