Wagiman language
error: ISO 639 code is required (help) Wagiman (also spelled Wageman, Wakiman, Wogeman) is a near-extinct Australian Aboriginal language spoken by less than 10 people in and around Pine Creek, in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory.
Language and Speakers
Wagiman is a member of the Gunwinyguan family of languages, a family that stretches from Arnhem Land, throughout Kakadu National Park and South to Katherine and beyond. Within this family, Wagiman is most closely related to three languages, Wardaman, Yangman and Dagoman. Of these three, only Wardaman is still spoken.
Wagiman is the ancestral language of an ethnic group of Australian Aborigines whose traditional land, before colonisation, extended for hundreds of square kilometres from the Stuart Highway, throughout the Mid-Daly Basin, and across the Daly River. The land is highly fertile and well watered, and encapsulates a number of cattle stations, on which many members of the ethic group used to work. These stations include Claravale, Dorisvale, Jindare and Tipperary.
The language region borders Waray and Jawoyn on the East, Wardaman and Jaminjung on the South, and Murrinh-Patha, Ngan'giwumirri and Malak Malak on the west.
Current Situation
The dominant language of the region is Mayali, a dialect of Bininj Gun-Wok (BGW) traditionally associated with the region surrounding Maningrida, in Western Arnhem Land. As it is a strong language with hundreds of speakers and a high rate of child acquisition, members of the Wagiman ethnic group gradually ceased teaching the Wagiman language to their children. As a result, all Wagiman people speak Mayali, while only a handful of elders speak Wagiman.
Wagiman Grammar
Parts of Speech
The three most important parts of speech in Wagiman are verbs, coverbs and nominals. Apart from these, there are a multitude of verbal and nominal affixes, interjections and other particles. Pronouns class with nominals.
Nominals
Like many Australian languages, Wagiman does not distinguish nouns from adjectives. They form one word class that is called nominals. Wagiman nominals take case suffixes that denote their grammatical or semantic role in the sentence. The grammatical cases are ergative, absolutive and dative and the semantic cases are instrumental, allative, ablative, locative, comitative, privative, temporal and semblative.
Verbs
Verbs are a closed class of word in Wagiman which contains fewer than 50 members. They are often monosyllabic verb roots and all are vowel-final. Wagiman verbs obligatorily inflect for person and number of the subject, and for the tense and aspect of the clause. A small set of verbs may take a non-finite suffix -yh, but then the entire non-finite verb must co-occur with another auxiliary verb.
Coverbs
There are so far over 500 recorded coverbs in Wagiman, and more are discovered with continuing research. Compared with verbs, coverbs are far more numerous and far more semantically rich. Verbs express simple, broad meanings such as yu- 'be', ya- 'go' and di- 'come', while coverbs convey vastly more specific, semantically narrow meanings such as barnhbarn-na 'make footprints', lerdongh-nga 'play (a didjeridu)' or murr-ma 'wade through shallow water using your feet to search for something'.
Coverbs however, cannot inflect for person and cannot, in and of themselves, head finite clauses. If they are to act as the head of a clause, they must combine with a verb, thereby forming a bipartite verbal compound, commonly called a complex predicate.
Phonology and Orthography
The Wagiman phonemic inventory is quite typical for a Northern Australian language. It has six places of articulation with a stop and a nasal in each. There are also a number of laterals and approximants, a trill and a phonemic glottal stop (represented in the orthography by 'h'). Wagiman also has a vowel inventory that is standard for the North of Australia, with a system of 5 vowels.
Consonants
Stops that are fortis are differentiated from those that are lenis on the basis of length of closure, as opposed to the voice onset time (VOT), the period after the release of the stop before the commencement of vocal chord activity (or voice) that normally differentiates voiced and voiceless stops in English and other languages.
Lenis stops in Wagiman sound like English voiced stops and are therefore written using the Roman alphabet letters b, d and g. Fortis stops however, sound more like voiceless stops in English, but are slightly longer that lenis stops. They are written with two voiceless letters, pp, tt and kk when they occur intervocalically (between two vowels).
Since the length of closure is defined in terms of time between the colsure of the vocal tract after the preceding vowel, and the release before the following vowel, stops at the beginning or end of a word do not have a fortis-lenis contrast. Orthographically in Wagiman, word-initial stops are written using the voiced Roman letters (b, d and g), but at the end of a word, voiceless letters (p, t and k) are used instead.
| bilabial | alveolar | retroflex | palatal | velar | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | p [p], b [b] | t [t], d [d] | rt [ʈ], rd [ɖ] | tj [c], j [ɟ] | k [k], g [g] | h [ʔ] |
| nasal | m [m] | n [n] | rn [ɳ] | ny [ɲ] | ng [ŋ] | |
| trill | rr [r] | |||||
| lateral | l [l] | rl [ɭ] | ||||
| approximant | w [w] | r [ɻ] | y [j] |
Vowels
As with many languages of the top-end, Wagiman has a standard five vowel system. However, a system of vowel harmony indicates that two sets of vowels are closely associated with each other. /e/ aligns closely with /i/ and similarly, /o/ merges with /u/. Specifically, high vowels assimilate in height to following mid vowels across syllable boundaries. mi- (2sg.IMP) and -ge ('put'), becomes mege 'you go and put it'.
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| close | i [ɪ] | u [ʊ] | |
| mid | e [ɛ] | o [ɔ] | |
| open | a [a] |
Syntax
Wagiman is a prefixing language, which, in the context of typology of Australian languages, may refer to its genealogical classification as well as its syntactic properties. Wagiman, along with other Gunwinyguan languages, inflects verbs for person and number of the subject obligatorily, and optionally for the object. In this respect Wagiman displays characteristics of a head-marking language. However, Wagiman also behaves as a dependent-marking language, in that nominals are case marked as to their grammatical or semantic roles, such as ergative (the subject of a transitive clause) or absolutive (the object of a transitive clause or the subject of an intransitive clause).
Morphology
Wagiman is a morphologically rich language and each part of speech has its own set of morphemes, some of which are obligatory, while others are optional.
Verbs
The verbal prefix contains information about the person and number of the subject, sometimes also the person and number of the object, as well as obligatory information about the tense of the clause. Furthermore, a verbal suffix conveys further information regarding tense and aspect. While only a small number of tense and aspect affixes exist, the interplay between those in the verbal prefix and in the suffix, can generate more highly specified temporal and aspectual clauses.
Further to these affixes, verbs may be marked for the number of the subject, be it dual or plural, and also for clusivity; whether the listener is included in the described event (inclusive) or is excluded from the event (exclusive).
Verb morphology in Wagiman is highly irregular. Of the small inventory of inflecting verbs, many have their own unique tense suffixes, while other tense suffixes are common to several verbs, and while some rudimentary verb classes can be identified - stance verbs always take the past tense suffix -nginy /ŋɪɲ/, for instance - the tense suffixes must be learned for each individual verb.
The prefixes on the other hand, are regular for each verb, although the complete paradigm of verb prefixes is highly complex. They encode three variables: person, number and tense, and are not segmentable; one prefix cannot be separated into the three parts. Ngani- for example, encodes second-person singular agent ('you'), first-person singular patient/undergoer ('me') as well as past tense.
Ngani-bu-ng
2sgA.1sgO.Past-hit-Perf
'You hit me'.
Nominals
Nominal morphology is significantly less complex than that of the verb. There are a number of case suffixes, denoting ergative, absolutive, dative, allative, locative, ablative, semblative, temporal, instrumental and so on. There are also some bound particles, which appear to function in much the same syntactic manner as cases, but which are not considered 'case', for theoretical reasons. -Binyju /bɪɲɟʊ/ 'only' is one of these nominal particles, as in gubiji-binyju 'only the bones (remained)'.
Nominals are also marked for number with a suffix that adjoins directly to the root, inside the case suffix. -giwu 'two', for example, would attach to the nominal root before the case, as in lamarra-giwu-yi dog-two-ERG 'the two dogs (did it)'. As cases cannot be stacked in Wagiman, these number suffixes cannot be called case suffixes, whereas the nominal suffixes discussed above, take the place of case and therefore may be analysed as cases themselves.
Coverbs
Coverbs also have their own set of inflectional morphemes, such as aspect, but may also take semantic case suffixes (all those listed above except for ergative and absolutive). For instance, a coverb may take the dative case to convey intention, or purpose, as in:
liri-ma-gu
swim-ASP-DAT
'for swimming'.
Coverbs are categorially differentiated from nominals though, in that a nominal may not take the aspectual suffixes that a coverb obligatorily takes.
Complex Predicates
A complex predicate is the combination of more than one element, more than one individual word, to convey the information involved in a single event. For instance, the event swim is conveyed in Wagiman using a combination of a verb ya- 'go' and a coverb liri-ma 'swimming'. There is no verb in Wagiman that, on its own, conveys the event of swimming.
Bipartite verbal compounds such as these are not peculiar to any language in particular. They are in fact very common, and may even occur in every language, albeit infrequently. English has a number of complex predicates, include go sightseeing, have breakfast and take (a) bath. The event described by go sightseeing is unable to be described using a single verb sightsee'; inflections like sightsaw and sightseen' are impossible. An event like take (a) bath, however, may be described by a single verb bathe, but it arguably has a slightly different meaning. Take (a) bath, in any case, is far more common.
Verbalisation
Wagiman is differentiated from other Australian languages in that it has a regular and productive process of verbalisation, whereby coverbs can become verbs and act as the independent head of a clause. Despite being fully productive, meaning all coverbs may undergo verbalisation, in practice only a handful of coverbs are commonly verbalised.
The process involves re-analysing the entire coverb - including a suffix -ma, which serves merely to indicate that it is unmarked for aspect - as a verb root, and then to apply the usual obligatory verbal inflection affixes for person, number and tense. As there is no discreet morpheme that serves as a 'verbaliser', the process is one of conversion.
References
- Cook, Anthony. Wagiman Matyin: a description of the Wagiman language of the Northern Territory. PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, 1987.
- Wilson, Stephen. Coverbs and complex predicates in Wagiman. CLSI Publications, 1999. ISBN 1575861720.
- Wilson, Aidan. Negative evidence in linguistics: The case of Wagiman complex predicates. The University of Sydney, (forthcoming).