Noongar Language

Noongar (Noonga), or Nyungar (Nyunga), is an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, or language complex, native to the region around Perth. The 1996 census recorded 170 speakers, but that number increased to 240 by 2006. The FATSIL (Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages) website states that out of thirteen dialects spoken by the Noongar people at the time of European settlement, only five still remain. The word "Noongar" can be roughly translated into English as "human being".

There was no standard Nyungar language, but a number of dialects. A creolized form of the eastern dialect of Noongar, known as Neo-Nyungar, is spoken by about 8,000 people. Noongar was first written in 1801 by Matthew Flinders, who made a number of word lists. Since then a number of different spelling systems have been devised.

A number of small wordlists were recorded in the early days of the Swan River Colony, for example Robert Lyon's 1833 publication A Glance at the Manners and Language of Aboriginal Inhabitants of Western Australia. During August and October 1839 the Perth Gazette published Vocabulary of the Aboriginal people of Western Australia written by Lieutenant Grey of HM 83rd Regiment. Grey spent twelve months studying the languages of the Noongar people and came to the conclusion that there was much in common between them, just prior to the publication he received from Mr Bussel of the Vasse District a list 320 words from that region which was near identical to those he'd collect in the Swan river region. The work of Grey much to his disappointment was published in an unfinished list as he was leaving the swan river colony but believed that the publication would assist in communication between settlers and Noongar people. Also noted by Grey was that the Noongar language had no soft c sound, there was no use of f and that h was very rarely used and never at the start of a word.

Serious documentation of Noongar language began in 1842 with the publication of A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines by George Fletcher Moore, later republished in 1884 as part of Moore's Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia. This work included a substantial wordlist of Noongar. The first modern linguistic research on Noongar was carried out by Gerhardt Laves on the variety known as "Goreng", near Albany in 1930, but this material was lost for many years and has only recently been recovered. Beginning in the 1930s and then more intensively in the 1960s Wilfrid Douglas learned and studied Noongar, eventually producing a grammar, dictionary, and other materials. More recently Noongar people have taken a major role in this work as researchers, for example Rose Whitehurst who compiled the Noongar Dictionary in her work for the Noongar Language and Culture Centre.

Today the Noongar language is regarded as endangered, with few fluent speakers, although there has been a revival of interest in recent years. The Noongar Language and Culture Centre was set up by concerned individuals and has now grown to include offices in Bunbury, Northam and Perth. However, the language generally referred to as "Noongar" today, bears questionable resemblance to what was spoken by indigenous Australians before white settlement, and the original "Nyungar" language is listed by ISO 639-3 (code "nys") as extinct. Ethnologue treats Nyungar and Neo-Nyungar (a term coined by Wilf Douglas to refer to Nyungar people's English) as equivalent (see and), suggesting that Nyungar is a variety of English: this appears simply to be a misunderstanding of Douglas. For comparison, the opening remarks of this paper are presented in both Noongar and English, by self-described "Nyungar at research" Leonard Collard of the Kurongkul Katitijin School of Indigenous Australian Studies at Edith Cowan University in Perth.

Visitors to Western Australia invariably notice the many placenames ending in -up, such as Joondalup, Nannup and Manjimup. This is because in the Noongar language, -up means "place of". For example the name Ongerup means "place of the male kangaroo".

Many words vary in a regular way from dialect to dialect, depending on the area. For example: the words for bandicoot include quernt (south) and quenda(west); the word for water may be kep (south) or kapi (west).

Noongar words which have been adopted into West Australian English, or more widely in English, include the given name Kylie ("boomerang"), gilgie (or jilgie) a freshwater crayfish similar to yabbies, and gidgie (or gidgee), meaning "spear". The word for smoke, karrik, was adopted for the family of compounds known as karrikins.