Bardi language

Endangered Australian Aboriginal language

Bardi (also Baardi, Baard) is an endangered Australian Aboriginal language in the Nyulnyulan family, mutually intelligible with Jawi and possibly other dialects. It is spoken by the Bardi people at the tip of the Dampier peninsula and neighbouring islands (north of Broome, in Northwestern Australia). There are few fluent speakers in the 21st century, but efforts are being made to teach the Bardi language and culture at at least one school.

Before European settlement at the end of the 19th century, the population size is estimated to have been ~1500 people, with essentially the entire community speaking Bardi. Since then, the ethnic population has increased in number (now contains about 2000 people), but is essentially monolingual in English today (with only the oldest few people still fluent in Bardi). Estimates vary as to how many fluent Bardi speakers remain, but as of lc=yes, many middle aged people could still understand the language, and some of them could speak it to a limited degree. The language and culture is being taught at Christ the King Catholic School in Djarindjin community by Bardi/Jabirr Jabirr man Vincent McKenzie, who grew up speaking Bardi.

Bardi is a member of the Western branch of the Nyulnyulan language family. According to R. M. W. Dixon (2002), Bardi was mutually intelligible with the following dialects: Jawi, Nyulnyul, Jabirr Jabirr, Ngumbarl, and Nimanburru. Ethnologue (206) treats all but Ngumbarl as distinct languages, and this view is supported by those linguists who have worked on the languages, including Claire Bowern and William McGregor. It is also the view of Bardi speakers.

There is considerable documentation of the Bardi language, but most of it is unpublished. The earliest work on the language, though now lost, dates from the 1880s. The earliest surviving records are from the start of the 20th century. Gerhardt Laves spent some time on Sunday Island in the late 1920s and recorded textual materials totalling over 1000 pages, and steady documentation has progressed since the late 1960s. In 2012, an extensive reference grammar was written by Claire Bowern and published by De Gruyter Mouton.

Bardi's syllabic template is
Bardi does not allow consonant clusters in the onset, except in borrowed words. A cluster of two consonants is allowed in the coda. That said, "within a syllable coda, the only possibility is /l/, /ɻ/ , or /r/ followed by a nasal which is homorganic with the following stop."

Stress is demarcative in Bardi. Primary stress in Bardi is always assigned to the first syllable, and all Bardi words receive this stress. In fact, primary stress even falls on the initial syllable of borrowed words that placed the stress elsewhere in their language of origin. Stress alone never distinguishes between minimal pairs in Bardi.

Bardi is highly affixal, containing both derivational and inflectional affixation. There are four major word classes in Bardi: nominals, verb roots, preverbs, and particles. These classes are defined according to their abilities to combine with other words and to inflect. Regarding their positioning across these two (i. e., distributional and inflectional) measures, "[a]ll four of the primary word classes can be distinguished on distributional criteria and three of the four can be distinguished on inflectional criteria as well."

Though Bardi is highly affixal, it also utilizes other morphological processes, including reduplication, infixation, and compounding. Verbal reduplication in Bardi is primarily used for iterative, distributive, or pluractional functions. Iterative reduplication of a verb marks that its action is repetitive (as seen below). Reduplicating a verb can also mark that the action is distributive, or done multiple times by multiple parties. Pluractionality, or multiple parties engaging in the same action, is also indicated by means of verbal reduplication. Bardi employs the morphological process of compounding. Jamoo means 'mother's father' and gamarda means 'mother's mother.' The two are combined to make jamoogamardaanim, meaning 'grandparents.' This same process is seen at work in a majority of Bardi's kinship terms.

Though Bardi has free word order, some ordering preferences do exist. These preferences are based on principles of “pragmatics, grounding, and focus.”

Often constituents are located 1) clause initially or 2) clause finally based on their contextual relevance. Focus constituents are usually clause initial. These constituents include information bearing contrastive focus, as well as information that is novel. Non omitted topics—information that is old but reintroduced—are usually clause final. In Bardi, topics that persist in discourse are usually omitted in the sentences following their initial introduction. However, if an old topic is overt it may be reintroduced into the sentence—in which case, it will usually be located in the final position of the clause.