Aboriginal Languages Australia

A package holiday coach tour in August 2024 went from Broome in Western Australia to Perth. One of the places visited was the Pinnacles,...

The following entry from the Macquarie archive gives basic information about the brolga but does not explain where the term ‘native...

Just to the west of Hornsby, a northern suburb of Sydney, is Old Mans Valley. One might reasonably assume that the name was inspired by...

The Rev. William Ridley (1819-1878) wrote an article, ‘Australian languages and traditions’ (AL&T), published in the February 1878 issue...

Reflecting on the wordlists from the Australian southwest, or no doubt from any area of the country, gives an occasional glimpse of the...

There are some transcontinental words, and bila is one of them. It means ‘stream’. WIRADHURI The following are from the Wiradhuri...

Daisy Bates provided the following sentence, with general and literal translations: dajä wâ gäbälä? Any fish in the river (or water)?...

The word for ‘heart’ is gurd. By extension, gurd is also used for someone loved: With the possessive suffix -ag to yield ‘heart-of’, the...

Lewis Jetta of the Sydney Swans celebrates his goal with an Indigenous Dance during the 2015 AFL round 17 match between the West Coast...

The sky darkens. There is a heaviness in the air. It feels damp. The clouds are massing. Then the rumbling of thunder starts and it...

barang crops up a lot. It seems to mean ‘carry’, ‘bring’ and the like. But is is also used in combinations, where it seems to have the...

WIALKI “Latitude 30° 29′ S Longitude 118° 07′ E The townsite of Wialki is … 341 km north east of Perth and 25 km east of Beacon. … Wialki...

The most common Nyungar word for ‘dog’ is durda: There were various spellings: Some recorders did not hear, or note, the ‘r’ sound: What...

What can ‘nest’, ‘barb’, ‘spear’, ‘leaf’, ‘hair’ and ‘shoulder’ have to do with one another? They all appear to be linked through manga /...

It often happens that a word appears in a list, with alongside it a simple translation, such as windu: ‘old’ There being several...

A large number of Nyungar words end in -gur but no common thread jumps out to suggest a meaning. gur also occurs on its own, as does the...

On p. 283 of A Nyoongar Wordlist from the Southwest of Western Australia (Bindon and Chadwick, 1992) there is an entry of which the...

yuda occurs in all the following expressions connected with flowering plants: From this is would seem the best interpretation of yuda is...

English commonly has specific words to express shades of meaning. It has, for example, endless words for colour names: not only ‘red’ but...

high/deep hard/firm bald rat young night There seem to be two distinct concepts here, one or the other possibly underlying several of the...