Wunambal is a moribund 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...

 of Western Australia

Western Australia

Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

.

Classification

Wunambal is usually grouped with Worrorra

Worrorra language

Worrorra is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language of northern Western Australia....

 and Ungarinjin in the Wororan family. R. M. W. Dixon

R. M. W. Dixon

Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland, and formerly Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.In 1996, Dixon and another linguist, Alexandra Aikhenvald,...

 (2002), however, regards Wororan as simply an areal group

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

. Recent work by Rumsey and McGregor (2009), however, demonstrates the cohesiveness of the family and its reconstructibility.

Wunambal has several dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

s, some of which may sometimes be treated as separate languages:

• Wilawila
• Gamberre
• Kwini (Gunin)
• Ginan
• Miwa (Bagu)
• Yiidji (Forrest River)