Warlpiri

Last Updated: 2019-08-09

Background

Language Family: Australian / Pama-Nyungan / South-West / Ngarga

• Warlpiri is spoken in the Northern Territory and Western state of Australia.

Phonology

Consonants

• Jagst (n.d.) includes a series of prenasalized stops in his analysis (p. 21).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Stops	p	t	ʈ	ɟ	k
Nasals	m	n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Flaps		ɾ	ɽ
Laterals		l	ɭ	ʎ
Approximants	w		ɻ	j

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive (Nash 1980, 65). Long vowels are represented by doubling the vowel character.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Low		a

Alphabet

• Word-initial /ʈ/, /ɳ/, and /ɭ/ are simply written as ⟨t⟩, ⟨n⟩, and ⟨l⟩ (Nash 1983, 2). Because alveolar consonants do not appear word-initially (Hale 1977, 2–3), this does not create any ambiguity. (See also Jagst, n.d., 26, for this issue.)

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
i	/i/
j	/ɟ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
p	/p/
r	/ɻ/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/
Digraph
ly	/ʎ/
ng	/ŋ/
ny	/ɲ/
rd	/ɽ/
rl	/ɭ/
rn	/ɳ/
rr	/ɾ/
rt	/ʈ/

Syllable Structure

• Warlpiri has a CV(C) syllable structure, except word-initially, where it becomes CV(V)(C) (Nash 1980, 78).

Lenition Rules

• Stops often gain voicing in unstressed syllables (Hale 1977, 3); the specific conditions under which these voicing processes occur differ slightly by consonant (Jagst, n.d., 22).
• Retroflex sonorants flap (/ɭ/ to [ɺ], /ɳ/ to [ɾ̃]?) after non-front vowels (Jagst, n.d., 25–26).

References

Hale, Kenneth. 1977. “Elementary Remarks on Walbiri Orthography, Phonology and Allomorphy.”

Jagst, Lothar H. n.d. “Ngardilpa (Warlpiri) Phonology (Language of the Warnayaka Tribe, a Subtribe of the Walpiri Tribe).” In Papers in Australian Linguistics No. 8, edited by M. Sharpe, L. Jagst, and D. Birk, 21–58. Pacific Linguistics Series a 39. Pacific Linguistics.

Nash, David. 1980. “Topics in Warlpiri Grammar.” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

———. 1983. “TESL and Warlpiri Children: Understanding Warlpiri Children’s Problems in Learning to Speak English.” N.T. Bilingual Education Newsletter 1: 6–24.