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. Croker Island (11°08′ S 132°33′ E) is an island in the Arafura Sea off the coast of the Northern Territory, Australia, 200 km northeast of Darwin. ... Motto: None Nickname: ? Other Australian states and territories Capital Darwin Government Administrator Chief Minister Const. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ... The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding Tasmania. ... The Cobourg Peninsula is located 350km east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia. ... Croker Island (11°08′ S 132°33′ E) is an island in the Arafura Sea off the coast of the Northern Territory, Australia, 200 km northeast of Darwin. ...

Phonology

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

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.

In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. ... Apical, from the Latin APEX (plural apices), meaning to be at the apex or tip, has a number of meanings. ... Alveolars are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, the internal side of the upper gums (known as the alveoles of the upper teeth). ... Retroflex consonants are articulated with the tip of the tongue curled up and back so the bottom of the tip touches the roof of the mouth. ... A laminal consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, which is the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue. ... Postalveolar (or palato-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge (the place of articulation for alveolar consonants) and the palate (the place of articulation for palatal consonants). ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... (adj. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ... The word Flap can refer to several things. ... In music, a trill is a type of ornament; see trill (music) In phonetics, a trill is a type of consonant; see trill consonant In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Trill are two symbiotic races of aliens; see Trill (Star Trek). ... The term lateral can refer to: an anatomical definition of direction. ... In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ...

Morphophonemics

Iwaidja has extensive morphophonemic alteration. For example, body parts occur with possessive prefixes, and these alter the first consonant in the root: Morphophonology or Morphonology is a branch of linguistics which studies: The phonological structure of morphemes. ...

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. Consonant mutation is the phenomenon in which a consonant in a word is changed according to its morphological and/or syntactic environment. ... The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, spoken by ancient and modern Celts alike. ...

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. A family of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997 A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and in some cases ownership (as was the case in the Roman... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ...

Reference

Nicholas Evans, 2000. "Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family." In Linguistic Typology 4, 91-142. Mouton de Gruyter.

External Link

• Ethnologue report for Iwaidja