The Wirangu language is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language traditionally spoken by the Wirangu people, living on the west coast of South Australia

South Australia

South Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories.South Australia shares borders with all of the mainland...

 across a region encompassing modern Ceduna

Ceduna, South Australia

Ceduna is a small town in the West Coast region of South Australia. It is situated in the northwest corner of Eyre Peninsula, facing the islands of the Nuyts Archipelago. It lies west of the junction of the Flinders and Eyre Highways around 786 km northwest of the capital Adelaide. The port...

 and Streaky Bay

Streaky Bay, South Australia

Streaky Bay is a coastal town on the western side of the Eyre Peninsula, in South Australia just off the Flinders Highway 303 km north west of Port Lincoln and 727 km by road from Adelaide...

, stretching west approximately to the Head of Bight and east to Lake Gairdner

Lake Gairdner

Lake Gairdner is a large endorheic lake in central South Australia, and is considered the fourth largest salt lake in Australia when it is flooded....

.
The Wirangu language is most closely related to the Thura–Yura group of Australian Aboriginal languages, which are spoken from the West Coast to the Adelaide area and north to the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre. The best-known relatives of Wirangu are Banggarla, Nukunu, Adnyamathanha, Narangga and Kaurna. Because of the intensive culture contacts in the southern half of South Australia, which brought dislocation and culture change, traditional lifeways and traditional ways of speaking declined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the case of Wirangu, the establishment of the Koonibba Mission in 1898 brought intense contact with other languages, in particular Kokatha. As all languages spoken in South Australia are ultimately derived from the same ancestor, they share a common inheritance of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. Moreover, neighbouring languages often borrow words from one another, and the new intense contacts at Koonibba led to a significant influx of Kokatha words which have become part of present day Wirangu. Although there are very few fully fluent Wirangu speakers left, many Aboriginal people in the Ceduna area remember parts of the language.

A Wirangu language revitalization program has been underway at Ceduna and surrounding areas since 2004. This has involved the recording of Wirangu language from the last two recognized full speakers of the language, Gladys and Doreen Miller. With the assistance of linguists from the University of Adelaide a number of printed and digital books have been produced for use in schools and in the wider community. In 2005 the Far West Languages Centre was established in Ceduna. The Centre supports and promotes the use of the Wirangu language as well as other extremely endangered local languages, such as Gugada/Kokatha and Mirning.

Classification

Wirangu is a Pama–Nyungan language, closely related to other neighboring Thura–Yura languages in the east such as Parnkalla and Nauo

Nauo language

Nauo is an extinct and little-recorded Australian Aboriginal language that was spoken by the Nauo people on the southern part of the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia...

. Wirangu also appears to have borrowed several lexical items from the Kukata people, who lived to the north of the Wirangu.

Vowels

Wirangu has three phonemic vowels (a, i, u). Vowel length is not usually considered phonemic in Wirangu, as vowel length is normally short, although it is predictably long in all monosyllabic words (Wirangu 'ma' [ma:], 'wa' [wa:], 'mil' [mi:l], etc.), borrowings from other languages ('maatha' [ma:t̪a] < English "master"), and cases of initial consonant loss across phonological boundaries ('marna' + '(k)artu' = 'marnaartu' [maɳa:ʈu]).

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
High	i	u
Low	a

Consonants

The consonantal phonemic inventory of Wirangu is very similar to that of many other Pama Nyungan languages, with six series of stops and nasals. Voicing is not phonemic in the Wirangu stop series, and many stops are either unvoiced or semivoiced. Wirangu also has two rhotics

Rhotic consonant

In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...

, an alveolar flap/trill and a more retroflex rhotic.

Peripheral Peripheral consonant In Australian linguistics, the peripheral consonants are a natural class encompassing consonants articulated at the extremes of the mouth: bilabials and velars. That is, they are the non-coronal consonants...		Laminal 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...		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...
Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	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)....	Dental	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	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...
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...		p	k	t̪	c	t	ʈ
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	ŋ	n̪	ɲ	n	ɳ
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....				l̪	ʎ	l	ɭ
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:...  or 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
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		j			ɻ

Further reading

External links

• Research report Commonwealth of Australia.