Native to Australia ISO 639-3 pjt | Writing system Latin | |
Region Northwest South Australia, Pitjantjatjara freehold lands, Yalata; southwest corner, Northern Territory; also in Western Australia. Native speakers 2,700 (2006 census)
80% monolingual (no date)
L2 speakers: 500 (1995) Language family Pama–Nyungan
Wati
Western Desert
Pitjantjatjara | ||
Pitjantjatjara ( /pɪtʃəntʃəˈtʃɑːrə/, [ˈpɪɟanɟaɟaɾa] or [ˈpɪɟanɟaɾa]) 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 the Yankunytjatjara dialect. The names for the two groups are based on their respective words for 'come/go.'
Contents
- Phonology and orthography
- Grammar
- Nouns and noun phrases
- Verbs and verb phrases
- Derivational morphology
- References
Pitjantjatjara is a relatively healthy Aboriginal language, with children learning it. It is taught in some Aboriginal schools. The literacy rate for first language speakers is 50–70%; and is 10–15% for second-language learners. There is a Pitjantjatjara dictionary and translated portions of the New Testament of the Bible, from 2002.Pitjantjatjara at Ethnologue (13th ed., 1996).
Phonology and 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 does not use.
Pitjantjatjara has the following consonant inventory, written as shown in bold:
Pitjantjatjara has three vowels:
Pitjantjatjara vowels have a length contrast, indicated by writing them doubled. A colon ⟨:⟩ used to be sometimes used 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:
Grammar
Some features distinctive to Pitjantjatjara include -pa endings on words that would otherwise end with consonants and a reluctance to y at the beginning of words.
Nouns and noun phrases
Pitjantjatjara uses case marking to show the role of nouns within the clause as subject, object, location, etc. Pitjantjatjara is a language with split ergativity since its nouns and pronouns show different case marking patterns.
Consider the following example, where the subject of a transitive verb is marked with the ergative case and the object with the absolutive case:
It can be contrasted with the following sentence with an intransitive verb, where the subject takes the absolutive case:
In contrast to the ergative-absolutive pattern that applies to nouns, pronouns show a nominative-accusative pattern. Consider the following examples, with pronoun subjects:
Verbs and verb phrases
Pitjantjatjara verbs inflect for tense. Pitjantjatjara has four different classes of verbs, each of which takes slightly different endings (the classes are named according to their imperative suffixes): ∅-class verbs, la-class verbs, wa-class verbs, and ra-class verbs.
Derivational morphology
It also has systematic ways of changing words from one part of speech to another: making nouns from verbs, and vice versa. However, words formed may have slightly different meanings that cannot be guessed from the pattern alone.