Iwaidja, in phonemic

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

 spelling Iwaja, is an Australian language

Australian Aboriginal languages

The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to the Australian Aborigines of Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding the languages of Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islanders...

 with about 150 speakers in northernmost Australia. Historically from the base of the Cobourg Peninsula

Cobourg Peninsula

The Cobourg Peninsula is located 350 kilometres east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is deeply indented with coves and bays, covers a land area of about 2,100 km², and is virtually uninhabited with a population ranging from about 20 to 30 in five family outstations, but...

, it is now spoken on Croker Island

Croker Island

Croker Island is an island in the Arafura Sea off the coast of the Northern Territory, Australia, 200 km northeast of Darwin. It is separated from Cobourg Peninsula in the west by Bowen Strait, which is 2.5 km wide in the south and up to 7 km in the north, and 8.5 km long. In...

. It is still being learned by children.

Phonology

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

	Bilabial	Apical Apical consonant An apical consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue . This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue .This is not a very common distinction, and typically applied only to fricatives... Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	Apical Apical consonant An apical consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue . This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue .This is not a very common distinction, and typically applied only to fricatives... Retroflex	Laminal Postalveolar	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m	n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	p	t	ʈ	c	k
Fricative					ɣ
Approximant			ɻ	j	w
Flap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:...			ɽ
Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....		r
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....		l	ɭ	(ʎ)
Lateral flap Lateral flap A lateral flap is a family of consonantal sounds, used in some spoken languages.There are four attested or claimed lateral flaps in the world's languages:* The alveolar lateral flap is quite common....		ɺ	ɺ̢	(ʎ̯)

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

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

 voiced, and are often written b d ɖ ɟ ɡ.

Morphophonemics

Iwaidja has extensive morphophonemic

Morphophonology

Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies, in general, the interaction between morphological and phonetic processes. When a morpheme is attached to a word, it can alter the phonetic environments of other morphemes in that word. Morphophonemics attempts to describe this process...

 alteration. For example, body parts occur with possessive prefixes, and these alter the first consonant in the root:

ŋa-ɺ̡uli	aŋ-kuli	ɹuli
my foot	your foot	his/her foot

Both the words arm and to be sick originally started with an /m/, as shown in related languages such as Maung

Maung language

Maung is an Australian language of northernmost Australia. It's the Iwaidjan language with the largest number of speakers....

. 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

Consonant mutation

Consonant mutation is when a consonant in a word changes according to its morphological and/or syntactic environment.Mutation phenomena occur in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages...

 — a situation perhaps unique in Australia, but not unlike that of the Celtic languages

Celtic languages

The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

.

	arm	to be sick
they	a-mawur "their arms"	a-macu "they're sick"
he/she/it	pawur "his/her arm"	pacu "s/he's sick"

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

Grammatical tense

A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

. 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
I-to-him	future	am father to	noun
"my future son" (lit. "I will be his father")

ɹi
he-to-her	is husband to	past
"his ex/late wife" (lit. "he was husband to her")

External links

• Ethnologue report for Iwaidja
• Documentation of endangered languages