SEMINAR: Linguistics Seminar Series

Yuwaalaraay Gamilaraay are two languages from the north-centre of New South Wales and adjacent Queensland. Only a few words and phrases from these languages were regularly being used in the 1990s, when major reclamation efforts began. There has been a major expansion of use since then, albeit of relatively simple language.

One challenge has been finding language for domains in which people want to use it. Two of the most common are greetings and ceremonial and official events. This has involved lexical development. At the same time efforts have continued to better describe traditional elements of the languages so that these can also be used in the reclaimed language.

I will consider some recently developed words found in the dictionary supplement (the Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Dictionary was published in 2003) and words whose use has been expanded. I will also consider the implications of ongoing grammatical and semantic analysis, and the potential for this to modify the current version of reclaimed Yuwaalaraay Gamilaraay. The practicalities of such work, including consultation and dissemination of the work, are also discussed.