Burarra language

The Burarra language is an

The Burarra people are from the Blyth and Cadell River regions of Central and North-central Arnhem Land, but many now reside further west in Maningrida township at the mouth of the Liverpool River.^[4][7]

Dialects

Glasgow (1994) distinguishes three dialects of Burarra: Gun-nartpa (Mu-golarra / Mukarli group from the Cadell River region), Gun-narta (An-barra, western side of the mouth of the Blythe River), and Gun-narda (Martay, eastern side of the Blythe River).^[7] These dialect names derive from each dialect's word for the demonstrative "that". She further notes that the two latter dialects (Gun-narta and Gun-narda) are frequently grouped together and referred to by their eastern neighbours as "Burarra", and by themselves as "Gu-jingarliya" ('language'/'with tongue').

Green (1987) distinguishes two dialects: Gun-nartpa and Burarra (Gu-jingarliya), but notes that noticeable dialectal differences exist within the group of Burarra speakers.^[4]

Phonology

Consonants

In most cases, fortis and lenis refers to the voicing in consonants where fortis is voiceless and lenis is voiced.^[9] In this case, plosives are distinguished by intra-oral peak pressure and stricture duration. Fortis consonants are usually longer in duration and have a greater intra-oral pressure while lenis consonants can often be pronounced as fricatives or approximants. The Burarra language also allows for the clustering of consonants.^[8]

Vowels

Burara has a five vowel system.

The vowels can be realized as:

• /i/: close-mid front vowel, [e], or [ɪ]
• /a/: low central vowels [ä], [ɐ] or schwa [ə]
• /æ/: [æ], [ɛ] or [e]
• /ɔ/: [ɔ] or [o]
• /u/: schwa [ə], a lowered open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ̞], a lowered [ö], or [ʊ]^[8]

Grammar

Burarra is a prefixing, multiple-classifying language. Verbs co-reference their subjects and objects through the use of prefixes, and inflect for tense and status. Serial verbs can be used to express categories like aspect, compound action and causation.^[4]

Nouns inflect for case and belong to one of four noun classes (an-, jin-, mun- and gun-).^[4][7]

Further reading

• Capell, A. (1942). "Languages of Arnhem Land, North Australia". Oceania. 12 (4): 364–392.
  doi:10.1002/j.1834-4461.1942.tb00365.x
  .
• Elwell, Vanessa (1982). "Some social factors affecting multilingualism among Aboriginal Australians: a case study of Maningrida". International Journal of the Sociology of Language (36): 83–103.
  doi:10.1515/ijsl.1982.36.83
  .
• Glasgow, Kathleen (1981). "Burarra phonemes". Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A (PDF). Vol. 5. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. 63–89. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 April 2021.
• Glasgow, Kathleen (1981). "Burarra orthography". Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A (PDF). Vol. 5. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. 91–101. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 April 2021.
• Green, Rebecca (2003). "Proto Maningrida within Proto Arnhem: evidence from verbal inflectional suffixes". In Evans, N. (ed.). The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent's most linguistically complex region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 369–421.
  hdl:1885/254183
  .
• Handelsmann, Robert (1996). Needs Survey of Community Languages: Central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory (Maningrida and Outstations) (Report). Canberra: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
• Trefry, D. (1983). "Discerning the back vowels /u/ and /o/ in Burarra, a language of the Australian Northern Territory". Working Papers of the Speech and Language Research Centre. 3 (6): 19–51.