Region South Australia Extinct ca. 2000 ISO 639-3 nnv | Ethnicity Nukunu Writing system Latin | |
 | ||
Language family Pama–Nyungan
Thura-Yura
(unclassified)
Nukunu | ||
Nukunu (or Nugunu; many other names: see below) is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language spoken by Nukunu people on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia.
Contents
Names
This language has been known by many names by neighboring tribes and Australianists, including:
Classification
Nukunu is a Pama–Nyungan language, closely related to neighboring languages in the Miru cluster like Narungga, Kaurna, and Ngadjuri.
Vowels
Nukunu has three different vowels with contrastive long and short lengths (a, i, u, a:, i:, u:).
Consonants
The Nukunu consonantal inventory is typical for a Pama–Nyungan language, with six places of articulation for stops and nasals. There are three rhotics in the language.
A phonemic voicing contrast exists in Nukunu, but it has only been observed in the retroflex stop series. An example demonstrating such a contrast intervocalically is kurdi (phlegm, IPA ['kuɖi]) and kurti (quandong, IPA ['kuʈi]).
History
In contrast with other Thura–Yura languages, Nukunu did not partake in either the initial th- lenition before vowels or the lenition of initial k- before vowels.