From First Languages Australia: Bonaventure Ngarri speaks Murrinhpatha, one of 300+ languages spoken by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Learn more: firstlanguages.org.au/.
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Murrinh-patha is an Australian Aboriginal language with about 2,500 active speakers. It is spoken primarily in Wadeye in the Northern Territory, which is inhabited mostly by Indigenous peoples, and it is the most commonly spoken Indigenous language there. Murrinh-patha is in the Southern Daly language family, which was historically considered to be an isolate due to limited lexical data; recent studies suggest similarities with Ngan’gityemerri, another Aboriginal language spoken in the Northern Territory, which could suggest an unknown shared parent language.
Because Murrinh-patha serves as the lingua franca in the Northern Territory, it is growing in and is therefore one Aboriginal language that is being revitalized in a major way.
The language has only four distinct vowels. Morphologically complex verbs have necessarily ordered morphemes, nouns are classed into 10 different semantic categories, and there are 31 different pronouns (some of which can occur in the middle of these complex conjugated verbs). The language has been standardized to a Latin orthography, but syntax has not been standardized since word order is often free.
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