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Abstract
This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate the linguistic vitality of Yankunytjatjara spoken in Coober Pedy and other communities in South Australia, with particular emphasis on extra-linguistic factors. The Western Desert dialects Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara are the two remaining ‘strong’ languages within South Australia, but considering the socio-cultural and political context wherein Indigenous Australian languages exist as spoken in decreasing numbers by members of encapsulated minorities, subject to an intrusive and increasingly dominant Euro-Australian culture, the question is how strong Yankunytjatjara really is. Different language endangerment indices are incorporated into the discussion with a view to how they apply to the study of contact-induced extensive linguistic change in general, and specifically to Yankunytjatjara.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to David Crombie, Bobby Brown, Toby Pinpayi, Ngitji Ngitji Mona Tur, Greg Wilson, Guy Tunstill, Paul Monaghan, Rob Amery, Peter Mühlhäusler, Emily Collins, and to Percy Bell, Research Statistics and Technology Branch, DCITA. Special credit is due to two anonymous AJL reviewers whose comments helped improve two previous drafts considerably, and to the late Yankunytjatjara man, Johnny Cullinan.
Notes
2In Goddard's analysis a distinction is drawn between noun compounds (concerning animals or inanimate things) and a ‘personal construction’ (where the primary term is a person). POSSESSIVE marking will occur within the last mentioned category in instances where a body part of the person in question has been severed.
3. Fairly typical in that the affix exclusively deals with borrowed verbs, but of course not necessarily concerning English in a cross-linguistic perspective.