Dyirbal

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Dyirbal

Spoken in

Australia (Region: Northeast Queensland )
speaker 8 (2016)
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

out

ISO 639-3

dbl

Dyirbal is one of the Pama Nyungan languages ​​and is spoken in Australia . The language has almost died out: in 2001 there were only six speakers left (according to Dixon in a fax), all of them over 65 years of age.

Thanks to the language description by RMW Dixon (1972), the Dyirbal has long been known for its ergativity , which affects both morphology and syntax. Another characteristic of the language is the division into four nominal classes , of which the second includes terms for "women, fire and dangerous things" (book title by George Lakoff 1987).

Dyalŋuy

There was a complex taboo system in the Dyirbal culture . It was not allowed to speak to, make eye contact with, or approach the in-laws, daughters and sons-in-law, the children of the father's sisters and the children of the mother's brothers.

Whenever someone was within earshot of a taboo relative, they had to use a complex politeness of language. It had similar phonemes and grammar but with completely different vocabulary except for the words for the grandparents.

This special and complex form of the language is known as Dyalŋuy . The Dyalŋuy has only a quarter of the vocabulary compared to the daily spoken Dyirbal, which limits the semantic content in the presence of taboo relatives. To overcome these limitations, the Dyirbal used many syntactic and semantic tricks to cope with this minimal vocabulary.

The vocabulary in Dyalŋuy comes from three main sources:

  • Loan words from the languages ​​and dialects spoken in the neighborhood every day
  • The creation of new Dyalŋuy forms through phonological modification of lexemes from the language spoken every day
  • Loan words that already existed in the neighborhood in taboo style

It is believed that children of the Dyirbal tribes had to learn the Dyalŋuy language from their cousins, who spoke Dyalŋuy in their presence , after they had already mastered the everyday language. By the onset of puberty, the young people were able to speak fluent Dyalŋuy and use it in the appropriate context. This language phenomenon, often called avoidance language, was typical of the Australian languages. It existed until the 1930s when the taboo system was largely forgotten.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b R. MW Dixon: The Dyirbal language of north Queensland . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1972.
  2. ↑ RMW Dixon: The origin of “mother-in-law vocabulary” in two Australian languages . In: Anthropological Linguistics , 32 (1/2), 1990, pp. 1-56.
  3. ^ M. Silverstein: Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description . In KH Basso, HA Selby (Eds.): Meaning in Anthropology . University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1976, pp. 11-55.
  4. ↑ RMW Dixon: A Typology of Causatives: Form, Syntax, and Meaning . In: RMW Dixon, Alexendra Y. Aikhenvald: Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity . Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 39-40
  5. ^ N. Evans: Context, culture, and structuration in the languages ​​of Australia . In: Annual Review of Anthropology , 32, 2003, pp. 13-40.
  6. ↑ RMW Dixon: The Dyirbal kinship system . In: Oceania , 59 (4), 1989, pp. 245-268.