Bininj Kunwok

Australian Aboriginal language

Bininj Kunwok is an Australian Aboriginal language which includes six dialects: Kunwinjku (formerly Gunwinggu), Kuninjku, Kundjeyhmi (formerly Gundjeihmi), Manyallaluk Mayali (Mayali), Kundedjnjenghmi, and two varieties of Kune (Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek). Kunwinjku is the dominant dialect, and also sometimes used to refer to the group. The spellings Bininj Gun wok and Bininj Kun Wok have also been used in the past, however Bininj Kunwok is the current standard orthography. Kundedjnjenghmi was not offered as an option according to the Australian Standard Classification of Languages (ASCL).

Bininj Kunwok is typical of the languages of central Arnhem Land (and contrasts with most other Australian languages) in having a phonemic glottal stop, two stop series (short and long), five vowels without a length contrast, relatively complex consonant clusters in codas (though only single consonant onsets) and no essential distinction between word and syllable phonotactics. The consonant and vowel tables include the standardized pan dialectal orthography.

Bininj Kunwok is polysynthetic, with grammatical relations largely encoded within the complex verb. The verb carries obligatory polypersonal agreement, a number of derivational affixes (including benefactive, comitative, reflexive/reciprocal and TAM morphology) and has an impressive potential for incorporation of both nouns and verbs. The Kunwinjku dialect preserved four noun classes but lost the core case marking on the nouns, and a handful of semantic cases are optional. Kune and Manyallaluk Mayali dialects have an optional ergative marker yih. Nominals have extensive derivational morphology and compounding.

Morphology is mainly agglutinating, with fusion zones at the edges of the word.

Bininj Kunwok shows syntactic patterns characteristic of 'non configurational' languages: nominal modifiers can appear without the N head (typical of many Australian languages), there is no rigid order within the 'nominal group', and the distinction between predicative and argumental use of nominals is hard to make.