Ngan’gikurunggurr is an Indigenous language spoken in the Daly River region of Australia’s Northern Territory. This language is often simply referred to as Ngan’gi (Reid & McTaggart, 2008), but is spoken in two distinctly named but mutually intelligible varieties called Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri. Ngan’gi is spoken by about 150-200 people in the region around the Daly River in Australia’s Northern Territory, most of them living in the communities of Nauiyu, Peppimenarti, Wudigapildhiyerr, and in a number of smaller outstations on traditional lands, such as Nganambala and Merrepen.

Codes for Ngan’gi in Language Lists

Ethnologue:ISO 639 identifier: nam

MultiTree: nam

Spelling variants

Ngan’gi is sometimes also referred to by its speakers as Ngan'gityemerri. The varieties of this language have been referred to across many sources using wildly different spellings, including:

• Nangikurrunggurr, Ngankikurungkurr, Ngenkikurrunggur, Ngangikarangurr, Ngankikurrunkurr, Nangikurunggurr, Nanggikorongo, Nangikurungguru, Nangikurungurr, Nangikurunurr, Nangityemer, Ngan’gikurunggurr, Ngangikurongor, Ngangikurrunggurr, Ngangikurrungur, Ngan'gikurunggurr, Ngangikurunggurr, Tyemeri, Moil, Moiil, Moyl, Moyle, Ngangi-Wumeri, Ngenkiwumerri, Nangumiri, Nangiomeri, Nangimera, Mariwumiri, Mariwunini, Murin-wumiri, Nanggiomeri, Nanggiwumiri, Nanggumiri, Nangimeri, Nangiomera, Nangi-wumiri, Ngan'giwumirri, Ngengewumiri, Ngen'giwumirri, Ngengomeri, Ngen-gomeri, Wumiri

Sometimes it is referred to by the names it is called in its neighbouring languages, such as Marityemeri, Marri Sjemirri, Murrinh Tyemerri.

Interesting grammatical features of Ngan’gi

Ngan’gi is a non-Pama Nyungan language with strong head-marking properties. It has just 31 finite verbs that combine with a largish class of coverbs to form morphologically complex verb words that correspond to the kind of information that would requite a sentence to convey in English, including information about the subject, the object, and other participants. Ngan’gi also has a rich system of 16 noun classes, including both bound prefixes and free words, which exhibit agreement properties on modifying words. Ngan’gi also has some sound features that are unusual by Australian standards, including a 3-way obstruent contrast – it has two series of stops as well as phonemic fricatives. The grammatical properties of Ngan’gi have been described by Reid and Hoddinott & Kofod and Tryon– see the reference list below.

How Ngan’gi is related to other languages

The first major study of Ngan’gi was Tryon’s 1974 work, which was a broad but shallow discussion of Ngan’gi as one of a dozen or so of the ‘Daly Family languages’. Tryon viewed Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri as two languages of the ‘Tyemeri Subgroup’ of the ‘Daly Family’. More recent work has changed this picture in two most significant ways.

Firstly, Tryon’s construction of an overall Daly Family is now seen as problematic. Green (2003) has suggested that, in place of the single family proposed by Tryon, the formal evidence establishes five separate Australian sub-groups in the region. These are given in Table 1 below, where identifiable branches of each sub-group are listed on separate lines. Green claims that the five sub-groups cannot yet convincingly be related together as a single genetic unit, and he argues that the similarities which Tryon took to be diagnostic of membership in the Daly Family are better accounted for either diffusionally or as genetically inherited features shared with a wide range of northern Australian languages. So at this point in time, it is not clear whether there is in fact any such valid grouping as ‘the Daly Language Family’.

Table 1: Genetic sub-groups in the Daly River region (Green & Reid, 2005)

Sub-group	Main Languages
Anson Bay	Batytyamalh (aka Wadyiginy) Kenderramalh (aka PunguPungu)
Northern Daly	MalakMalak, Tyeraty, Kuwema
Eastern Daly	Matngele Kamu
Western Daly	Marrithiyel, Marrisyefin, Marri Ammu Marringarr, Mati Ge Marramaninydyi Marranunggu (aka Warrgat), Emmi, Menhthe
Southern Daly	Murrinh-Patha Ngan’gikurunggurr, Ngen’giwumirri, Ngen’gimerri

Secondly, while Tryon was right in viewing Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri as two closely related languages (or dialects of a single language, depending on your criteria), he did not consider Murrinh-Patha, spoken around Wadeye, to be related to them. However, as is also evident from Table 1, the understanding of how Murrinh-Patha fits in has also been recently radically revised. Murrinh-Patha was for many years regarded as something of an Australian isolate, accepted as a member of the Australian language family, but not seen as belonging to any lower level sub-group. In particular Murrinh-Patha was thought to have no close genetic link with any of the dozen or so languages of the Daly River region to its north and east. This view of Murrinh-Patha’s genetic status was based on the lexical data; Murrinh-patha has at most an 11% shared vocabulary density with any other language against which it has been tested (Reid, 1990).

Present research is however overturning these long-held assumptions. Green (2003) makes the case for considering Murrinh-Patha as, together with the two Ngan’gi languages, Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri, making up the genetic sub-group Southern Daly.

This revised view of the relationship between Ngan’gi and Murrinh-Patha is based primarily on formal correspondences in the core morphological sequences of their finite verbs. Green shows that these are too matching in both their complexities and their shared irregularities to have plausibly come about through anything other than a shared genetic legacy. He demonstrates this through reconstruction of finite verb paradigms, showing that Murrinh-Patha and the Ngan’gi languages can be systematically derived from a common parent language.

It is true that today Ngan’gi and Murrinh-Patha do not sound like related languages. They share little common vocabulary, and speakers of one certainly cannot automatically understand the other. Certainly native speakers of both these languages do not consider them to be related in any way. However the linguistic evidence suggests that quite a long time ago they diverged from a single ancestral language. This seems to be the only feasible way to account for their shared finite verb forms.

Despite this revised view, it must be admitted that some real mysteries still remain: it is not really clear, at the time of writing, how two related languages, spoken side by side (or at least close enough for speakers to have regular contact), could actually end up looking as different as Ngan’gi and Murrinh-Patha do today. Current thinking about language change simply has no good explanation for this unusual situation. Perhaps future work will tell us something further about this…

Published and unpublished works on Ngan’gi language

• Alpher, Barry and Courtenay, Karen. nd. unpublished fieldnotes.

Alpher and Courtenay collected some Ngan’gikurunggurr data whilst working at the School of Australian Linguistics (now part of Batchelor College) at some time in the late 1970s. A list of words, with some analysis of verbal morphology, held in Batchelor College Library.

• Callan, William. nd. A grammar of Ngankikurunguru. ms. AIATSIS, Canberra.

William Callan may have been a teacher at the Daly River School, and may have had some connection with the NT Arts and Heritage Museum. This manuscript contains no date, but quotes Tryon, so it was probably written in the early 1970s. Length 44 pages, includes some vocabulary and partial finite verb paradigm tables.

• Capell, Arthur. Ms unpublished fieldnotes.

Capell collected some undated fieldnotes on what is probably Ngen'gimerri, but may be Ngen'giwumirri. These have never been published and because of delays in the organisation of Capell's literary estate, we have not been able to see these materials yet.

• Ellis, S.J. 1988. Sociolinguistic survey report: Daly region languages. In Ray, M.J. ed Aboriginal Language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports. Work Papers of SIL-AAIB, B13. Darwin: SIL.

• Green, I. 2003. The Genetic Status of Murrinh-patha. In Evans, N. ed The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region. Studies in Language Change, 552. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

• Green, I. and N.J. Reid. 2005. Murrinh-Patha and the Daly Languages. In Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol 2. ed. Philipp Strazny. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. (14 pages).

• Hoddinott, W. and F. Kofod. 1988. The Ngankikurungkurr Language (Daly River Area, Northern Territory). Series D, No. 77, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

This is the largest published description of Ngan’gi.

• Laves, Gerhardt. 1931. ms 2189. Unpublished fieldnotes on Ngan’gimerri. AIATSIS Library, Canberra. Laves was the first linguist to work on Ngan'gityemerri. In 1931 he collected some 200 pages of vocabulary, grammatical notes and (largely untranscribed) texts, in Ngan'gimerri, the speech variety of the now extinct rak-Merren patri-line. Laves returned to the USA later that year, and appears not to have published anything from his Australian data. His works, including detailed studies of Matngela, Karriyarri, Kumbaingir and Nyungar, were acquired by AIATSIS in 1986. Laves work is particularly interesting, both for the quality of the analysis, and the diachronic evidence it provides for changes within the Ngan'gi verb structure (see Reid 2003 for details).

• Reid, N.J. 1981. The Basic Morphology of Ngan’gikurunggurr. Unpublished Honours thesis. Australian National University: Canberra.

• Reid, N.J. 1986. Ngani Kinyi Gimi Ngandim Ngangginim Ngan’gikurunggurr e Ngen’giwumirri. Unpublished ms. for Nauiyu school.

• Reid, N.J. 1990. Ngan’gityemerri. Unpublished PhD thesis. Australian National University: Canberra.

• Reid, N.J. 1997. Class and Classifier in Ngan’gityemerri. In Harvey, M. & N. Reid (eds) Nominal Classification in Aboriginal Australia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Reid, N.J. 2000. Complex verb collocations in Ngan’gityemerri: a non-derivational mechanism for manipulating valency alternations. In Dixon. R.M.W. and A. Aikenvald (eds) Changing Valency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Reid, N.J. 2002a. Sit right down the back: serialized posture verbs in Ngan’gityemerri and other Northern Australian languages. In Newman, J. ed. Sitting, Lying and Standing: Posture verbs in typological perspective. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

• Reid, N.J. 2002b. ‘Ken Hale would just love this’: finding the 31st Ngan’gityemerri finite verb. In Simpson, J. and Nash, D. and Laughren, M. and Austin, A. and Alpher, B. eds. Forty Years On: Ken Hale and Australian Languages. Pacific Linguistics: Canberra.

• Reid, N.J. 2003. Phrasal verb to synthetic verb: recorded morphosyntactic change in Ngan’gityemerri. In Evans, N. (ed) Studies in Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

• Reid, N.J. 2005b. Languages of the World: Ngan'gityemerri. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics II. Oxford: Elsevier.

• Reid, N.J. and P. McTaggart. 2008. Ngan'gi Dictionary. Armidale: Australian Linguistics Press.

• Reynolds, nd. Unpublished wordlist manuscript. [Robyn Reynolds worked as a schoolteacher/nun at the Daly River Mission during 1979–1980. During this time she developed some basic literacy materials in Ngan’gikurunggurr, including a wordlist.

• Tryon, Darrell. 1968. The Daly River Languages: a survey. Series A,14. Pacific Linguistics: Canberra.

• Tryon, Darrell. 1970a. The Daly Language Family: a structural survey. In Laycock, D. ed Linguistic Trends in Australia. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 23. Canberra: Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies. pp51–57.

• Tryon, Darrell. 1970b. Noun Classification and Concord in the Daly River Languages. Mankind. Vol 7, 3. pp218–222.

• Tryon, Darrell. 1974. The Daly Family Languages, Australia. Series C, no. 32. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.