Darkinjung (Darrkinyung; many other spellings; see below) is an Australian Aboriginal language, the traditional language of the Darkinyung people. While no audio recordings of the language survive, several researchers have compiled wordlists and grammatical descriptions. It has been classified as a language no longer fully spokenNational Indigenous Languages Survey Report 2005 and it can be classified as needing a language renewalAustralian Indigenous Languages Framework (Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia, 1996) program. It was spoken adjacent to Dharuk, Wiradhuri, Gamilaraay, and Awabakal. The Darkinjung tribe occupied a small part of southeastern Australia inside what is now the New South Wales area. They likely inhabited a considerable tract of land within Hunter, Northumberland, and Cook counties.
Alternate names The name of the language has various spellings as recorded by both Mathews and W.J. Enright, among others, who worked of documentation from the 19th century: Darkinjang (Tindale 1974) Darkinjung Darkiñung (Mathews 1903) Darrkinyung Darginjang Darginyung Darkinung Darkinoong Darknüng Darkinyung
Revitalisation effort Since 2003 there has been a movement from the Darkinyung language group to revitalise the language. They started working with the original field reports of Robert H. Mathews and W. J. Enright. Where there were gaps in the sparsely populated wordlists, words were taken from lexically similar nearby languages. This led to the publication of the work Darkinyung grammar and dictionary: revitalising a language from historical sources. This may be ordered from the publisher, Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative.
Phonology Much of our understanding of Darkinjung phonology comes from papers published by R.H. Mathews in 1903. When analysing these sources, we may generalise that there were around 15 consonant phonemes, and approximately 3 vowels.
Consonants BilabialDentalAlveolarPalatalVelarPlosiveNasalTrillApproximantLateral
In Darkinjung, like many Australian languages, b, d, and g are interchangeable with p, t, and k and will not change the meaning of the word. The fact that this table shows b, d, and g is arbitrary.
Vowels FrontBackHighLow
Morphology
"Tags"
Darkinjung makes use of what Mathews refers to as "tags," or suffixes to denote relationships between objects in sentences.
Number tags -bula "two" and -biyn "several"
Possessor Tag: -gayi
Locative "at, on, in" tags: -a/ -da/ -dja/ -ga/ -wa
The locative tags -ga and -wa appear to be found after stems ending in vowels.
Words with locational information seem to coincide with nouns that also carry a locative tag:
Ergative case tags: -a/ -da/ -ga/ -ya. Words that end in the consonant ŋ receive that tag /-ga/
References
External links Bibliography of Darkinjung people and language resources , at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies