Pitjantjatjara language

Pitjantjatjara is a dialect of the Western Desert Language traditionally spoken by the Pitjantjatjara people of Central Australia. It is mutually intelligible with other varieties of the Western Desert language and is particularly closely related to Yankunytjatjara language. Features distinctive to Pitjantjatjara include -pa endings on words that would otherwise end with consonants, missing y at the start of most words, and the use of pitjantja to mean coming/going (as opposed to yankunytja in Yankunytjatjara language). The last distinction is how the language gets its name.

Only about 20% of Pitjantjatjara speakers know English. This caused controversy in May 2007, when the Australian government launched a plan to force Aboriginal children to learn English.^[1] Between 50% and 70% are literate in their own language. There is a lot of resentment among Aboriginal people about the lack of recognition of their languages from the government and the Australian population.

The longest official place name in Australia is a Pitjantjatjara word, Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill in South Australia, which means "where the Devil urinates".^[2]

Grammar

Pitjantjatjara uses word endings to express things such as plurals, verb tenses and moods, etc. like the way English does. It also has systematic ways of changing words from one part of speech to another, eg. making nouns from verbs, and vice-versa. However the words formed this way often have slightly different meanings that can not be guessed just from the pattern.

Pitjantjatjara has four different classes of verbs, which take slightly different endings: zero class verbs, l (or la) class verbs, ng (or wa) class verbs, and n (or ra) class verbs.

Orthography

There are slightly different standardised spellings used in the Northern Territory and Western Australia compared to South Australia, for example with the first two writing "w" between "a" and "u" combinations and a "y" between "a" and "i", which SA doesn't use.

Pitjantjatjara consonants are written with the following letters, letter combinations, and underlined letters:

• Stops: p tj t ṯ k
• Nasals: m ny n ṉ ng
• l-sounds: ly l ḻ
• other: w y r ṟ

Note that ṟ is written as r at the start of words, since words can't begin with the real r consonant.

Pitjantjatjara vowels are written with only three vowels:

• a i u

Representing "a" as in father, "i" as in in, and "u" as in "put". "o" sounds are written as "a", and "e" sounds are written as "i", since they are considered variations in pronunciation of those vowels.

Vowels are doubled to indicate long vowels:

• aa ii uu

In the past, a colon was sometimes used instead to indicate long vowels:

• a: i: u:

Pitjantjatjara requires the following underlined letters, which can be either ordinary letters with underline formatting, or Unicode characters which include a line below:

• Ḻ: unicode 1E3A
• ḻ: unicode 1E3B
• Ṉ: unicode 1E48
• ṉ: unicode 1E49
• Ṟ: unicode 1E5E
• ṟ: unicode 1E5F
• Ṯ: unicode 1E6E
• ṯ: unicode 1E6F

External links

• Ngapartji Online course of Pitjantjatjara language, and related performance event 2006
• Ethnologue report for language code:pjt
• Languages and dialects associated with Uluru
• Omniglot.com

References

• Goddard, Cliff (1992). Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara to English Dictionary, Second Edition. IAD Press: Alice Springs.
• Langlois, Annie (2004). Alive and Kicking: Areyonga Teenage Pitjantjatjara, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. ISBN 0858835460