Daly languages

The Daly languages are an areal group of four to five language families of Indigenous Australian languages.[1][2] They are spoken within the vicinity of the Daly River in the Northern Territory.

Daly
(geographic)
Geographic
distribution
Daly River region, northern Australia
Linguistic classificationGeographic group of Australian language families.
Subdivisions
GlottologNone
The Daly languages (color), among the other non-Pama-Nyungan languages (grey)

Closeup. Anson Bay is the northernmost section, Murrinh-patha the westernmost.

Classification

In the lexicostatistic classification of O'Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin, the Daly languages were put in four distinct families.[3] Darrell Tryon combined these into a single family, with the exception of Murrinh-patha.[4][5] However, such methodologies are less effective with languages with a long history of word borrowing.

Ian Green found that the languages could not be shown to be related by the comparative method, and so should be considered five independent families and language isolates.[6] The features they do share also tend to be shared with neighboring languages outside the Daly group.

The established families (according to Nordlinger) are:

Malak-Malak and Wagaydyic were once considered grouped into a Northern Daly family. Contemporary classifications may use Northern Daly to refer to Malak-Malak to the exclusion of the Wagaydyic languages (as Nordlinger does).

gollark: Can we just fence off affected areas?
gollark: Also, the colony is doing fine and they can be decelerated.
gollark: ...
gollark: How far away are they right now?
gollark: Do they have anything *actionable* to say?

References

  1. Nordlinger, Rachel (2017). "Chapter 37: The languages of the Daly region (Northern Australia)". In Fortescue, Michael; Mithun, Marianne; Evans, Nicholas (eds.). Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 782–807.
  2. McConvell, Patrick; Evans, Nicholas, eds. (1997). Archaeology and Linguistics: Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
  3. O'Grady, G. N.; Voegelin, C. F.; Voegelin, F. M. (1966). "Languages of the world: Indo-Pacific Fascicle 6". Anthropological Linguistics. 8 (2).
  4. Tryon, D. T. (1968). "The Daly River languages: a survey". Papers in Australian Linguistics. 3: 21–36.
  5. Tryon, D. T. (1974). Daly family languages, Australia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  6. Green, I. "The Genetic Status of Murrinh-patha" in Evans, N., ed. "The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region". Studies in Language Change, 552. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003.
  • The Daly Languages website (dalylanguages.org) brings together analysis, field note sketches and recordings of these languages.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.