Yinggarda language
language of the Gascoyne region of Western Australia
The Yinggarda language (also written Yingkarta and Inggarda) is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is an endangered language, but efforts at language revival are being made.
Name
"Yinggarda" has been spelt in a number of ways, some linguists (including Dench) writing it as "Yingkarta".
Classification
It is one of the Kartu languages of the Pama–Nyungan family. The Ethnologue equates Yinggarda with Pulinya but it is unclear what the basis is for this connection as Wilfrid Douglas, who recorded the name 'Pulinya,' described it as a name for the old Geraldton language.
Geographic distribution
Yinggarda country is around Carnarvon, on the central western coast of Western Australia, and extends inland to near Gascoyne Junction and south to around the mouth of the Wooramel River.
Dialects
Maya (Maia), known only from 12 names of totem species identical to those in Yinggarda (e.g. yalipirri 'emu' and wura 'dog'), is reported to have been "like" Yinggarda and may have been a dialect.
Language revival
A dictionary of Yinggarda by Peter K. Austin was published in 1992. A sketch grammar was written by Alan Dench in 1998, who worked with some of the last speakers and carried out his research mainly in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Yinggarda language” enters the record as language of the Gascoyne region of Western Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yinggarda, language and Gascoyne can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yinggarda language” 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.