Marra, sometimes formerly spelt Mara, is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper, Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Borroloola and Minyerri.
Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction. It is characterized by an intricate aspectual system, elaborate kin terms, no definite structure for relative clause construction, and a complex demonstrative system. Unlike many languages in the area, it has little avoidance language and no difference in the speech of male and female speakers.
Language and speakers Marra is a member of the Arnhem family, the second-largest Australian language family after Pama–Nyungan.Bowern & Koch, 2004. Australian Languages: Classification and the Comparative Method, p 44 The Marra people refer to themselves as or , and their language as . In addition to Warndarrang, which was spoken to the north of Marra along the Roper River, Marra was also in contact with Alawa (spoken inland, to the west), Binbinga and Wilangarra (West Barkly languages to the south), and Yanyuwa (a Pama–Nyungan language to the southeast).
The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia): , , and . In the 1970s, when the first serious fieldwork was being done on Marra, the clan was extinct, though a family with the surname Riley of the clan and a man by the name of Anday of the clan were able to provide the linguist Jeffrey Heath with cultural and linguistic information.
The three clans, together with the Warndarrang-speaking group, made up a set of four patrilineal semimoieties, each of which had their own set of songs, myths, and rituals. Each semimoiety was also associated with a totem (olive python or fork-tailed catfish for , goanna for , black-headed python or antilopine kangaroo for , and king brown snake for ) and had responsibilities for that totem. Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names , , , and ().
In the years 1973–1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary. With the help of four principal informants – Mack Riley, Tom Riley, Johnnie (who was Warndarrang but spoke Marra and Nunggubuyu for most of his life), and Anday – Heath was able to collect grammar and vocabulary information as well as extensive texts on clan songs and totem rituals.
Marra grammar (All grammatical information from Heath 1981 unless otherwise noted.)
Phonetics
Consonant inventory Marra has a consonant inventory nearly identical to those of Warndarrang and Alawa. There are two additional phonemes: the interdental and which occur only in a few flora-fauna terms, and are likely loanwords from either Nunggubuyu or Yanyuwa, both of which languages use these phonemes frequently.
With the interdentals excepted, the Marra consonants consist of a stop and a nasal in each of five places of articulation with two laterals, two rhotics, and two semivowels.
A standard orthography has been developed over several years of work with Diwurruwurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation (also known as the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre). The standard orthography is used throughout this article, but the table below also gives the equivalent IPA symbols in brackets where appropriate. The interdental sounds have not been included in the table as they are only found in loanwords.
Peripheral Laminal Apical Bilabial VelarAlveolar Retroflex Plosive Nasal Vibrant Lateral Approximant
It is not clear if the vibrant is a trill or a tap.
Vowel inventory Marra has three main vowels:
Front Back High Low
The vowel is found in exactly two words, , "paper wasp", and , "sandfly", and the vowel in one word, , a common interjection meaning "yes!" found throughout the area, including in the local English-based creole.
There is no contrast in Marra vowel length, though the first vowel of a two-syllable word is often lengthened, as are the word-final vowels in a particular style of story-telling.
Words cannot begin with a vowel, with the exception of a handful of stems beginning with /a/.
Phonology
Clusters Vowels clusters do not occur; all but one of adjacent underlying vowels are deleted. The only permitted word-initial consonant clusters are homorganic (involving the same place of articulation) nasal + stop combinations, particularly mb or ngg. The nominative prefix n-, when added to a stem beginning with a cluster, is usually pronounced with the preceding syllable, and the n- with combined with /r/ or /n/ results in the addition of the meaningless particle –nga- between the prefix and the stem.
Word-final consonant clusters can only take the form liquid (lateral or rhotic) plus noncoronal (labial, laminoalveolar, or velar) stop or nasal. Within a word, triple clusters are limited to a liquid and a homorganic nasal + stop cluster or to a liquid, a noncoronal, and any other consonant. Examples of this include , "kookaburra", and , "extinguished fire". Many double-consonant clusters can occur.
Lenition In segments that are repeated in a word – either by reduplication or by chance morphology – the second stop is often lenited into a semivowel or lost altogether. /j/ and /ʈ/ will become /y/, /b/ will become /w/, and /g/ will either become /w/ or Ø. This lenition can optionally occur at the beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel.
There are also several instances of word-initial lenition of /g/ or /b/ to /w/, in cardinal directions, kin terms, and a few other isolated examples. At the beginning of verb stems, the underlying combination rrn will have the surface form of n, whereas an n followed by the phonemes l, rl, rr, r, n, or ny in any other context results in the deletion of the initial n.
Nasalization Stops are frequently nasalized (pronounced as the nasal at the stop place of articulation) when followed by a nasal or any other non-stop. Examples of this include the reduplicated "to mix a lot" from "to mix" or the noun + case ending of from "juvenile euro (Macropus robustus)".
Nominal morphology In Marra, there is no clear grammatical distinction between nouns, adjectives, and adverbs; they are all treated the same morphologically. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, however, each form a distinctive word class, and all can be clearly distinguished from verb complexes.
Noun phrases typically consist of an article, a noun, and the possibilities for adjuncts, which often but not always follow the main noun.
Articles Nouns are usually preceded by an article, which marks case, gender, and number. The nominative articles, for instance, are as follows:
+ nominative articles masculine singular feminine singular neuter dual plural
Case prefixes In additional to the articles, each noun is marked with a prefix containing information about case (nominative or non-nominative), gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and number (singular, plural, dual), as follows:
+ Case prefixes Nominative Non-nominative Masculine singular Feminine singular Neuter Dual Plural
Almost all non-human singular nouns are marked as masculine, though some specifically-female marsupial terms can be marked as feminine. The neuter case is reserved for body parts, topographic terms, abstract conceptions, and the word , "sun".
Case suffixes Nouns in Marra are marked by suffixes for one of six cases: nominative ergative/instrumental/genitive allative/locative ablative pergressive purposive
The nominative () is used for intransitive subjects or transitive objects – such a case is usually called the "absolutive", though some languages to the south of Marra have an absolutive case that is distinct from this usage.
The ergative or instrumental case (also , though takes the non-nominative prefix) is used to mark the subject of a transitive verb (the usual meaning of "ergative") or to mark the object used to complete the action of the verb (the usual meaning of "instrumental"). This case, along with a genitive pronoun, is also used to mark possession (see below).
The allative/locative case () signals the idea of direction of motion ("to X"), static location ("in/on/at X"), or motional location ("by/through X"). Though this meaning is within the domain of the pergressive case in many related languages, the Marra pergressive (, "through" or "along") is restricted to body-part or topographic terms.
The ablative case is used to specify the origin of motion. It takes the form for most nouns but for place names.
Lastly, the purposive indicates the goal of the verb, as in the sentence , "I set fires for game" (i.e., in order to hunt or obtain game), where the verb is intransitive and thus , "game" takes the purposive and not the nominative.
Possession Possession is typically marked by a genitive pronoun, though if the possessor noun (in the ergative/instrumental case) is present the pronoun is sometimes omitted. For example, means "his camp" with the third person singular genitive pronoun , and either or can mean "the man camp."
Quantifiers Marra has five basic numerals, one through five:
1 or "one" 2 "two" 3 "two-another" 4 "two two" 5 "like hand"
The numerals six through ten are expressed by combining "five" with another number, e.g., for "nine". There are also more general quantifiers such as and , "many"; , "big group" (non-human); , "big group" (human); and , "a few".
Reduplication Like many Australian languages, Marra has a process known as reduplication, where some or all of a stem is repeated. With human nouns, reduplication takes the meaning of three or more of that noun, such as , "three or more old people" from , "old person", and a few topographic nouns can be reduplicated to mean the collective plural, as in , "islands".
With both human and non-human nouns, reduplication along with the pergressive case suffix can create the meaning "having X" or "having lots of X", as in , "having a woman" (being a married man) from , "woman".
A few verb stems also display partial reduplication to indicate a repeated action, as in , "he repeatedly tied it or them up" as opposed to , "he was tying it or them up".
Personal pronouns In addition to the pronoun markers on nouns (see above) and verbs (see below), Marra also has independent personal pronouns. Unlike other nouns, pronouns do not show a nominative/ergative distinction but instead use the nominative form to mark all subjects as well as the direct object of a transitive verb. Because these pronouns are marked within the verb clause, their inclusion is often optional and can be used to highlight a particular point in what is known as the "emphatic" case.
Personal pronouns have paradigms in seven cases – nominative, emphatic, genitive, ablative, oblique stem, allative/locative, and purposive – for each of first person (singular, exclusive dual, inclusive dual, exclusive plural, and inclusive plural), second person (singular, dual, and plural), and third person (masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter singular, dual, and plural).
Demonstrative pronouns There are five categories for demonstrative pronouns: proximate, localized immediate, unlocalized immediate, distant, and anaphoric. With the proximate stems, there are separate forms for predicative (in the "predicate" of the sentence, or the part that modifies the subject) or nonpredicative nouns.