Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal 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...

 spoken on the Tiwi Islands

Tiwi Islands

The Tiwi Islands are part of Australia's Northern Territory, north of Darwin where the Arafura Sea joins the Timor Sea. They comprise Melville Island and Bathurst Island, with a combined area of ....

, within sight of the coast of northern Australia. It is one of about 10% of Australian languages still being learned by children.

Traditional Tiwi, spoken by people over the age of fifty by 2005, is polysynthetic. However, this grammatical complexity has been lost among younger generations. Tiwi has around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated into verbs, most of them quite different from the corresponding free forms.

Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

, although recent evidence using the experimental historical linguistic technique of structural phylogenetics suggests that Tiwi may in fact be related to the Gunwinyguan language

Gunwinyguan languages

The Gunwinyguan languages form the second largest family of Australian Aboriginal languages. They are spoken in Arnhem Land in northern Australia. The most populous language is Gunwinygu, with some 1500 speakers....

 family.

Consonants

As do most Australian languages, Tiwi has four phonetically distinct series of coronal stops

Coronal consonant

Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...

. (See Coronals in Indigenous Australian languages.) There are contrasting 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...

 and postalveolar

Postalveolar consonant

Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...

 apical consonant

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...

s, the latter often called retroflex

Retroflex consonant

A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology...

. However, the two laminal series

Laminal consonant

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 on the top. This contrasts with apical consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the tongue apex only...

 are in complementary distribution

Complementary distribution

Complementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment...

, with postalveolar laminal [t̠] (sometimes described as alveolo-palatal

Alveolo-palatal consonant

In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate...

) occurring before the front vowel /i/, and denti-alveolar

Denti-alveolar

In linguistics, a denti-alveolar consonant is a consonant that is articulated with a flat tongue against the alveolar ridge and upper teeth, such as and in languages such as Spanish and French...

 laminal [t̪] occurring before the non-front vowels, /a/, /o/, /u/. That is, phonologically Tiwi has at most three series. However, some analyses treat postalveolar [ʈ] as a sequence /ɻt/, since it only occurs in medial position.

	Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Denti- alveolar Denti-alveolar In linguistics, a denti-alveolar consonant is a consonant that is articulated with a flat tongue against the alveolar ridge and upper teeth, such as and in languages such as Spanish and French...	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...	Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	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)....
Plosive	p [p]	th [t̪] ~ [t̠]	t [t]	rt [ʈ]		k [k]
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 [m]	nh [n̪]	n [n]	rn [ɳ]		ng [ŋ]
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....		rr [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 [l]	rl [ɭ]
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...	w [w]			r [ɻ]	y [j]	? [ɰ]

In addition, Tiwi has a velar approximant, which is somewhat unusual for an Australian language. Typically for an Australian language, there are no fricatives.

Tiwi allows consonant clusters in medial position. Besides the possibility of /ɻt/ for [ʈ], these include other liquid-stop clusters and nasal-stop clusters such as /mp/. However there is little reason to choose between an analysis of /mp/ as being a cluster as opposed to a prenasalized stop.

There is also a glottal stop (ʔ) in the inventory of speech sounds in Tiwi, but as Osborne notes, it functions to mark the end of a sentence and as such, is best analysed as a part of Tiwi prosody.

Vowels

Tiwi has four phonemic vowels.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Open		a	o

The frequency of the open-back vowel /o/ is relatively low. It is neutralised with /a/ following /w/, and it doesn't occur initially or finally. However mimimal pairs exist, albeit few in number, to prove its existence as a distinct phoneme:

/jilati/ knife

/jiloti/ forever

Each phonemic vowel exhibits a broad range of allophones, many of which overlap with allophones of other vowels, and three vowels (/i/, /a/ and /u/) reduce to /ə/ in many unstressed syllables. All vowels are phonemically short, while long vowels occur when medial glides are reduced. For example:

/paɻuwu/ [paɻu:] (placename)

Morphology

Tiwi is characterized by its highly complex verb morphology. Tiwi is a polysynthetic language with a heavy use of noun incorporation such that all elements of a sentence may be expressed in a single morphological and phonological word as in the following example.

jinuatəməniŋilipaŋəmat̪at̪umaŋələpiaŋkin̪a

He came and stole my wild honey this morning while I was asleep

Around one hundred nominals may be incorporated into the verb in Tiwi, but the incorporated forms often differ significantly from the corresponding free forms, or their closest semantic correspondent as illustrated below.

Incorporated form	Free form	Gloss
-maŋu-	kukuni	'fresh water'
-ki-	yikwani	'fire'
-kəri-	yikara	'hand'

Dixon (1980) suggests that while some forms have merely undergone phonological reduction as a result of being grammaticalized, others bear no phonological resemblance to their corresponding free form due to lexical replacement and taboo.

Verb morphology

Osborne (1974) identifies eleven grammatical categories

Grammatical category

A grammatical category is a semantic distinction which is reflected in a morphological paradigm. Grammatical categories can have one or more exponents. For instance, the feature [number] has the exponents [singular] and [plural] in English and many other languages...

 that can be marked on verbs. They are listed below using his terminology. All verbs must be marked for tense, person and number, and third person-singular subjects and objects are also obligatorily marked for gender. All other categories listed below are not grammatically obligatory.

Verbal categories after Osborne (1974)

Category	Description
Person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	Performer and/or undergoer of the event with respect to the speaker and hearer.
Number Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....	Either Singular Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... or Plural Plural In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one... .
Gender Grammatical gender Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...	Either Masculine Masculine Masculine or masculinity, normally refer to qualities positively associated with men.Masculine may also refer to:*Masculine , a grammatical gender*Masculine cadence, a final chord occurring on a strong beat in music... or Feminine Feminine Feminine, or femininity, normally refers to qualities positively associated with women.Feminine may also refer to:*Feminine , a grammatical gender*Feminine cadence, a final chord falling in a metrically weak position... .
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:...	Either Past Past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future... , Non-past or Future Future tense In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,... .
Aspect Grammatical aspect In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...	There are five aspects in addition to the unmarked: durative, repetitive, moving, beginning and inceptive Prospective aspect In linguistics, the prospective aspect is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time. One way to view tenses in English and many other languages is as a combination of a reference time in which a situation takes place, and the time of a particular... .
Mood Grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...	The moods are an unmarked indicative, imperative, subjunctive, compulsional and incompletive.
Voice Voice (grammar) In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments . When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice...	The voices are reflexive, reciprocal, collective and causative.
Location/direction	The marked location is 'at a distance' or, when marked on a motion verb, 'from a distance'.
Time of day	The times of day that can be marked are either early morning (up until noon) or evening.
Stance	Verbs can take stance markers to indicate whether the event was carried out while standing or while walking along.
Emphasis	Verbs in the imperative mood can additionally take emphasis.

The terminology Osborne uses for the grammatical categories, in particular the aspects and voices, does not conform to more recent cross-linguistic standards (see terms for various aspects). For instance, Osborne glosses verbs containing the beginning aspect as started to, which closer aligns to what is now called the inceptive or inchoative, while the aspect that Osborne calls inceptive is glossed as about to, which is more reminiscent of the prospective

Prospective aspect

In linguistics, the prospective aspect is a grammatical aspect describing an event that occurs subsequent to a given reference time. One way to view tenses in English and many other languages is as a combination of a reference time in which a situation takes place, and the time of a particular...

.

Nominal morphology

Tiwi, like many Indigenous Australian languages, does not distinguish between nouns and adjecives. Both things and properties or qualities of those things are encoded by the nominal

Nominal (linguistics)

In linguistics, a nominal is a part of speech in some languages that shares features with nouns and adjectives.- Examples :Nominals are a common feature of Indigenous Australian languages, many of which do not categorically differentiate nouns from adjectives.Some features of nominals in some...

 word class. Nominals in Tiwi are marked for gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 and number

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

. However, the plural

Plural

In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...

 is ungendered, resulting in three categories: masculine, feminine and plural.

Gender

Gender is sexually assigned for humans and animals, but semantically assigned for inanimate objects on the basis of shape. Things that are thin, small and straight are assigned to the masculine gender, and objects that are large round and ample are assigned to the feminine. As a result, nominals in Tiwi may take either gender depending on the context and reference. Grass, for instance, is masculine when referring to a blade of grass, but feminine when referring to a patch or expanse of grass.

Masculine nominals are marked either by the suffix -ni or -ti, and feminine nominals by -ŋa or -ka. Furthermore, many nominals are implicitly masculine or femenine and lack overt marking. However, as nominals denoting properties always take regular gender suffixes that agree with the object they modify, the covert gender of these nominals can be ascertained.

The table below from Osborne (1974:52) lists the suffixes marking each gender as well as their rate of occurrence among 200 tokens from each class.

Masculine	Feminine
-ni (54.0%)	-ŋa (54.0%)
-ti (17.0%)	-ka (24.5%)
-ø (29.0%)	-ø (21.5%)

Number

Nominals in Tiwi can be marked for plural either by a plural suffix -wi or -pi. The plural suffix fills the same morpheme slot as gender suffixes and as a result, plurals do not contrast for gender. Some nominals (Osborne counts nineteen) undergo partial reduplication of the stem when pluralised. The form of the reduplicant is always Ca- (where C becomes the initial consonant of the stem), thus muruntani 'white man' and muruntaka 'white woman' pluralise to mamuruntawi 'white people'.

Human and Non-human

Osborne also identifies a distinction among Tiwi nominals as to whether they belong to a Human class or a Non-human class. However the category is covert

Covert (linguistics)

In linguistics, a feature of a word or phrase is said to be covert if there is no surface evidence of its existence within that word or phrase. For example, many languages have covert grammatical gender in nouns, in that there is no way to tell from the form of a noun which gender it is; gender...

 on nominals themselves, and is only marked on numerals.

	Human	Masculine Non-human	Feminine Non-human
two	juraɻa	jiraɻa	jin̪t̪aɻa
three	jurat̪ərima	jirat̪ərima	t̪at̪ərima

Modern Tiwi

Since contact wth Europeans, Tiwi has been undergoing changes to its structure that have resulted in a modern version of the language that is quite typologically distinct from Traditional Tiwi. These changes have affected the verb morphology and lexicon of Tiwi, resulting in a language that is relatively isolating

Isolating language

An isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio — in the extreme case of an isolating language words are composed of a single morpheme...

, compared with its polysynthetic predecessor.

Contact with English has also resulted in a number of other varieties of Tiwi, such as Children's Tiwi and Tiwi-English, in which Tiwi people have varying levels of proficiency. In 1993, Traditional Tiwi was spoken only by people over 55, with Modern Tiwi being spoken by everyone up until the age of 30

The main change that separates Traditional and Modern Tiwi is the level of complexity in the verb. Traditional Tiwi is a polysynthetic language while Modern Tiwi is isolating, with some inflection. The examples below show the difference between a sentence rendered in Traditional Tiwi and Modern Tiwi.

Traditional Tiwi

a-mpi-ni-watu-wujingi-ma-jirrikirnigi-yangurlimay-ami

she-NPST-LOC-morning-DUR-COM-light-walk-MOV

She (the sun) is shining over there in the morning

Modern Tiwi

japinari wokapat a-mpi-jiki-mi kutawu with layt

morning walk she-NPST-DUR-do there with light

External links

• Ethnologue report for Tiwi