Jawoyn
group of Indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory of Australia
The Jawoyn, also written Djauan, are an Australian Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory of Australia. The Bagala clan are of the Jawoyn people.
Language
Jawoyn, known as Kumertuo, is a non-Pama–Nyungan language that belongs to the Macro-Gunwinyguan group of languages of Arnhem land. (It has recently been established that the Gunwinyguan and Pama-Nyungan languages are both branches of a proto-Macro-Pama–Nyungan language.) At one time, Kumertuo was a group of several closely related spoken dialects, but since resettlement in the post-war period, these dialects have been tending to converge into a single standardized language.
Country
Historically, the land occupied by the Jawoyn, which Norman Tindale has estimated covered about 3,800 square miles (9,800 km2), were in the Katherine Gorge area in the Northern Territory. The Jawoyn call this area Nitmiluk, a name derived from the word nitmi (which refers to the cicada song that Nabilil the crocodile is said to have heard when he set up camp at the entrance to a particular gorge) and the word luk, which means "place". “Nitmiluk” specifically denotes a 12-kilometre stretch there, consisting of a chain of chasms and ravines. It has been suggested that the Jawoyn people refers not only to those who speak a Jawoyn language, but also to those who are associated with the landscapes inscribed in the Jawoyn language according to their foundational mythology of the Dreamtime. The language itself, in several varieties, was spoken along the Katherine River system as far as the Mainoru River. Their southern limits were around Maranboy, and their western extension came close to Katherine.
“Jawoyn” enters the record as group of Indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory of Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jawoyn, group and Indigenous can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jawoyn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.