Arrernte language

Dialect cluster of Central Australia

Arrernte or Aranda ('/ʌr//ə//n//d//ə/; ), or sometimes referred to as Upper Arrernte (Upper Aranda), is a dialect cluster in the Arandic language group spoken in parts of the Northern Territory, Australia, by the Arrernte people. Other spelling variations are Arunta or Arrarnta, and all of the dialects have multiple other names. There are about 1,800 speakers of Eastern/Central Arrernte, making this dialect one of the widest spoken of any Indigenous language in Australia, the one usually referred to as Arrernte and the one described in detail below. It is spoken in the Alice Springs area and taught in schools and universities, heard in media and used in local government. The second biggest dialect in the group is Alyawarre. Some of the other dialects are spoken by very few people, leading to efforts to revive their usage; others are now completely extinct.

The Arrernte also have a highly developed sign language, also known as Iltyeme iltyeme.

The Northern Territory Department of Education has a program for teaching Indigenous culture and languages, underpinned by a plan entitled Keeping Indigenous Languages and Cultures Strong – A Plan for Teaching and Learning of Indigenous Languages and Cultures in the Northern Territory with the second stage of the plan running from 2018 to 2020. The Alice Springs Language Centre delivers language teaching at primary, middle and senior schools, offering Arrernte, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese. There are two courses teaching Arrernte at tertiary level: at the Batchelor Institute and at Charles Darwin University. There are books available in Arandic languages in the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages. Projects are being run to revive dying dialects of the language, such as Southern Arrernte/Pertame.

This description relates to Central or Eastern Arrernte.

The underlying syllable structure of Eastern/Central Arrernte is argued to be VC(C), with obligatory codas and no onsets. Underlying phrase initial is realised as zero, except before a rounded consonant where, by a rounding process of general applicability, it is realised as It is also common for phrases to carry a final corresponding to no underlying segment. Among the evidence for this analysis is that some suffixes have suppletive variants for monosyllabic and bisyllabic bases. Stems that appear monosyllabic and begin with a consonant in fact select the bisyllabic variant. Stress falls on the first nucleus preceded by a consonant, which by this analysis can be stated more uniformly as the second underlying syllable. And the frequentative is formed by reduplicating the final VC syllable of the verb stem; it does not include the final .

Peter Sculthorpe's music theatre work Rites of Passage (1972–1973) is written partly in Arrernte and partly in Latin. Western and Southern Arrernte were used in parts of the libretto for Andrew Schultz' and Gordon Williams' Journey to Horseshoe Bend, based on the novel by Ted Strehlow.