Lardil Language - New Lardil

New Lardil

While very few speakers of Lardil in its traditional form remain, Norvin Richards and Kenneth Hale both worked with some speakers of a “New Lardil” in the 1990s which displays significant morphological attrition compared to the Old variety. Previously minor sentence forms in which the object of a verb takes nominative case have become generalized, even in instances where the verb is in future tense (objects of future verbs historically inflected for futurity). One of a number of negation patterns has become generalized, and the augmented forms of monosyllabic verb roots reinterpreted as base forms.