Kayardild language

Kayardild is a moribund Tangkic language spoken by 43 of the Kaiadilt on the South Wellesley Islands, north west Queensland, Australia. Other members of the family include Yangkaal (spoken by the Yangkaal people), Lardil, and Yukulta (Ganggalidda).

Kayardild is a critically endangered language, considered near-extinct. In 1981, there were around fifty native speakers of Kayardild. The number of speakers of Kayardild significantly reduced since the 1940s as a result of the stolen generations. By 1981, there were fifty known native speakers. In the 2016 census, there were eight, and this number increased to 43 in 2021.

Phonology

Grammar

Kayardild is known for its many unusual case phenomena, including case stacking of up to four levels, the use of clause-level case to signal interclausal relations and pragmatic factors, and another set of 'verbal case' endings which convert their hosts from nouns into verbs morphologically. It is also well-known for only allowing subordination one level deep. Kayardild is the only known spoken language where tense markers appear on both nouns and verbs.

Speakers tend to have a preference for subject–object–verb word order.

Bibliography

• Evans, Nick (1995a). "Current Issues in Australian languages". In Goldsmith, John A. (ed.). The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics (1st ed.). Blackwell. pp. 723–761.
• Evans, Nicholas (1995b). . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-012795-9.

Further reading

• Evans, Nicholas (1988). "Odd topic marking in Kayardild". In Austin, Peter (ed.). Complex sentence constructions in Australian Languages. Typological Studies in Language. Vol. 15. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 219–266. doi:. ISBN 978-90-272-2887-1.
• Evans, Nicholas (1992). Kayardild Dictionary and Thesaurus. University of Melbourne: Department of Linguistics and Language Studies.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Evans, Nicholas (1995c). "The Kayardild language". In Robinson, Julia (ed.). Voices of Queensland. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
• Evans, Nicholas (1995d). . In Plank, F. (ed.). Double case. Agreement by Suffixaufnahme. Oxford University Press. pp. 396–428. ISBN 9780195087758.
• Evans, Nicholas (2001). "Typologies of agreement: some problems from Kayardild". Transactions of the Philological Society. 101 (2): 203–234. doi:. hdl:.
• Evans, Nicholas (2006). "Kayardild". In Brown, Keith (ed.). Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. Vol. 6. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 168–169.
• Round, Erich (2009). (PhD thesis). Yale University.
• Round, Erich (2013). Kayardild Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-965487-1.
• Round, Erich; Corbett, Greville G. (2016). . Morphology. 27 (1): 1–55. doi:.