Last Updated: 2020-06-26
Background
Language family: Australian / Gunwingguan / Burarran
- Burarra is spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Phonology
Consonants
- Although D. I. Glasgow and Glasgow (1967) attest that the voiced stops are allophones of the corresponding voiceless stops (pp. 3-4), Green (1987) states that they are contrastive word-medially (initial stops occurring as voiced, final stops occurring as voiceless; p. 3). I have chosen to follow the more recent analysis of the language. Therefore, I include the voicing distinction below.
- The alveolar and retroflex consonants are not contrastive word-initially (Green 1987, 4). Although not orthographically represented (due to lack of simplicity), the retroflex consonants are considered underlying. The rules represent the retroflex consonants appropriately given that they are technically underlying in this position.
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Alveolar
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Retroflex
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Palatal
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Velar
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Stops
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p b
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t d
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ʈ ɖ
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c ɟ
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k ɡ
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Nasals
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m
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n
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ɳ
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ɲ
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ŋ
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Trills
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r
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ɽ
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Approximants
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w
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l
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ɭ
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.
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Vowels
- Vowels do not occur in succession (D. I. Glasgow and Glasgow 1967, 8).
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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a
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Alphabet
- Where the sequence ⟨ng⟩ refers to separate consonants as opposed to /ŋ/, a fullstop (.) appears between the two graphemes (K. B. Glasgow 1981, 94). These sequences, however, are extremely rare, and the convention does not appear in the Crúbadán corpus.
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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b
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/b/
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d
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/d/
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e
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/e/
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g
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/ɡ/
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i
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/i/
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j
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/ɟ/
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k
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/k/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/p/
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r
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/ɽ/
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t
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/t/
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u
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/u/
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w
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/w/
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y
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/j/
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Digraph
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ch
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/c/
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ng
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/ŋ/
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ny
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/ɲ/
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rr
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/r/
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rt
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/ʈ/
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rd
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/ɖ/
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rn
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/ɳ/
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rl
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/ɭ/
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Orthographic Exception
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rnd
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/ɳɖ/
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Lenition Rules
- /b/ may be realized as [w] within a prefix when preceding a stem-initial /b/ or /m/ (K. B. Glasgow 1981, 86).
Misc. Rules
- Unstressed vowels are deleted when occurring in homorganic nasal-stop and stop-nasal sequences (K. B. Glasgow 1981, 84).
References
Glasgow, David I., and Kathleen Glasgow. 1967. “The Phonemes of Burera.” In Papers in Australian Linguistics 1, 10:1–14. Pacific Linguistics, Series a. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Glasgow, Kathleen B. 1981. “Burarra Phonemes.” In Australian Phonologies: Collected Papers, edited by Bruce Waters, 5:63–89. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Australian Aborigines Branch a. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Green, Rebecca. 1987. “A Sketch Grammar of Burarra.” B.A. Hons Thesis, Canberra: Australian National University; Australian National Univ.