Tiwi language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Tiwi | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Australia | |
| Region: | Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory. | |
| Total speakers: | 1,500 | |
| Language family: | Australian Tiwian Tiwi |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | aus | |
| ISO 639-3: | tiw | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia.
It is polysynthetic, though this grammatical complexity is being lost among the younger generations. According to Dixon (1980) there are around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated, but most of them are quite different from the corresponding free forms.
Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate.
[edit] Bibliography
- Osborne, C.R. 1974. The Tiwi language. Canberra: AIAS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies)
- R. M. W. Dixon 1980: The languages of Australia (Cambridge language surveys) Cambridge University Press
ISBN 0-521-22329-6 (hard covers) and ISBN 0-521-29450-9 (paperback)
[edit] External links
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