Pitjantjatjara dialect

Western Desert dialect of Central Australia

Pitjantjatjara (/p//ɪ//tʃ//ən//tʃ//ə/'/tʃ//ɑː//r//ə/; or ) is a dialect of the Western Desert language traditionally spoken by the Pitjantjatjara people of Central Australia. It is mutually intelligible with other varieties of the Western Desert language, and is particularly closely related to the Yankunytjatjara dialect. The names for the two groups are based on their respective words for 'come/go.' Pitjantjatjara is a relatively healthy Aboriginal language, with children learning it. It is taught in some Aboriginal schools. The literacy rate for first language speakers is 50–70%; and is 10–15% for second language learners. There is a Pitjantjatjara dictionary, and the New Testament of the Bible has been translated into the language, a project started at the Ernabella Mission in the early 1940s and completed in 2002. Work continues on the Old Testament.

Some features distinctive to the Pitjantjatjara dialect, as opposed to other Western Desert Language dialects, include pa endings to words that simply end in a consonant in other dialects (this is reflective of a general aversion in Pitjantjatjara to words ending with a consonant), and a reluctance to have y at the beginning of words.

Pitjantjatjara verbs inflect for tense. Pitjantjatjara has four different classes of verbs, each of which takes slightly different endings (the classes are named according to their imperative suffixes): ∅ class verbs, class verbs, class verbs, and class verbs. See page on grammatical conjugation for examples.

It also has systematic ways of changing words from one part of speech to another: making nouns from verbs, and vice versa. However, words formed may have slightly different meanings that cannot be guessed from the pattern alone.

The Ernabella Mission was established by Charles Duguid and the Presbyterian Church of Australia in 1937 at the location now known as Pukatja, supported by the South Australian government. The Mission aimed to keep the language and culture alive, with the missionaries learning the language themselves and teaching it in the school as well as delivering sermons in it. This meant that the language became a written language for the first time, and the people became literate in their own language before English.

The first draft of the New Testament's Gospel of Mark, Tjukurpa Palja Markaku, was completed in 1945 by Reverend Bob Love and Ronald Trudinger at the Mission, and was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1949. Work continued over the next 20 years, with publication of a shorter New Testament in 1969 by the Bible Society Australia. Pitjantjatjara Bible Translation Project, incorporated in 1981, completed a new translation of the New Testament and about 15% of the Old Testament, first published in 2002. In 2011 a new project to translate the rest of the OT was initiated, as of lc=yes working on various OT books. In 2017 members of the Pitjantjatjara Bible Translation Project and partners began a multi voice recording of the Pitjantjatjara New Testament, with 50% completed by 2017.

Pitjantjatjara includes several loan words from English.

The Pitjantjatjara word ngangkari, added to the Macquarie Dictionary in 2019 and defined as an Indigenous practitioner of bush medicine, was short listed for the 2019 Word of the Year.

LibreOffice provides locale data and a spellchecker for Pitjantjatjara.