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Damin (Demiin in the practical orthography ofLardil) was aceremonial languageregister used by the advanced initiated men of the aboriginalLardil (Leerdil in the practical orthography) andYangkaal peoples of northern Australia. Both inhabit islands in theGulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil onMornington Island, the largest island of theWellesley Islands, and the Yangkaal on the Forsyth Islands. Their languages belong to the samefamily, theTangkic languages. Lardil is the most divergent of the Tangkic languages, while the others are mutually comprehensible with Yangkaal.

The Lardil wordDemiin can be translated asbeing silent.

The origin of Damin is unclear. The Lardil and the Yangkaal say that Damin was created by a mythological figure inDreamtime.^{[citation needed]} Hale and colleagues believe that it was invented by Lardil elders; it has several aspects found inlanguage games around the world, such as turning nasal occlusives such asm andn intonasal clicks, doubling consonants, and the like. Evans and colleagues, after studying the mythology of both tribes, speculate that it was the Yangkaal elders who invented Damin and passed it to the Lardil.^{[citation needed]} According to Fleming (2017), "the eccentric features of Damin developed in an emergent and unplanned manner in which conventionalized paralinguistic phonations became semanticized as they were linked up with a signed language employed by first-order male initiates".^[3]

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The Lardil had two initiation ceremonies for men, namelyluruku, which involvedcircumcision, andwarama, which involvedpenile subincision. There were no ceremonies for women, although women did play an important role in these ceremonies, especially in the luruku ceremony.

It is sometimes said that Damin was a secret language, but this is misleading since there was no attempt to prevent the uninitiated members of the Leerdil tribe from overhearing it. However it was taught during thewarama ceremony and, therefore, in isolation from the uninitiated. At least one elder is known, who, though not having been subincised, had an excellent command of Damin, but this seems to have been a unique case.

Damin lexical words were organised into semantic fields and shouted out to the initiate in a single session. As each word was announced, a second speaker gave its Lardil equivalent. However, it normally took several sessions before a novice mastered the basics and could use Damin openly in the community. One speaker did claim to have learned to speak Damin in a single session, but on the other hand two seniorwarama men admitted that they lacked a firm command of the register.

Once Damin had been learned, the speakers were known asDemiinkurlda ("Damin possessors"). They spoke the register particularly in ritual contexts, but also in everyday secular life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like.

The cultural traditions of the Lardil and Yangkaal have been in decline for several decades, and the Lardil and Yangkaal languages are nearly extinct. The lastwarama ceremony was held in the 1950s, so nowadays Damin is no longer in use by either the Yangkaal or the Lardil.

However, recently^[when?] a revival of cultural traditions has begun, andluruku has been celebrated.^{[citation needed]} It remains to be seen whetherwarama ceremonies will also be reactivated.

Damin words had three ofLardil's four pairs of vowels,[a,aː,i,iː,u,uː]; the fourth,color-coded[æ,æː] (written "e", "ee" in the practical orthography), occurred in grammatical suffixes.

It is possible that in monosyllabic words the distinction between long and short vowels is conditioned. See#phonotactics below.

Damin was the onlyclick language outsideAfrica,^[4] though lexical clicks do occur elsewhere in language games such asChinese nursery rhymes. Many consonants are "rearticulated", meaning that therelease is repeated.^[5] In the wordj2iwu (also writtenjjiwu), for example, the consonantj is articulated twice:[t̠ʲ\t̠ʲiwu], which on its own may even sound like[t̠ʲit̠ʲiwu].^[6] Damin used only some of the consonants of everyday Lardil (which are allpulmonic), but they were augmented by four otherairstream mechanisms:lingual ingressive (the nasal clicks),glottalic egressive (a velar ejective),pulmonic ingressive (an indrawn lateral fricative), andlingual egressive (a bilabial 'spurt'). Even some of the pulmonic egressive consonants are exotic for the Australian context: fricatives, voiceless nasals, bilabial trills, and uvular affricates.

The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography andIPA equivalents, were the following:^[7][b]

The Lardil consonantsrd, rn, rl, m, n, l, r (color-coded) are only found in Lardil grammatical suffixes used in Damin, if they occur at all; stronger Damin may replace many of these with simpler morphology.

There is no apical alveolar–retroflex distinction in Damin root words, with the apparent exception of the clicks.^[11] In Lardil, the distinction is neutralized to apico-domal in word-initial position, but in Damin it is neutralized to apical alveolar in all positions. However, a contrast may occur when Lardil suffixes are added to Damin roots.^[10]

L* is described as "ingressive with egressive glottalic release".^[5]

pf is transcribed[pɸ] but "is possibly apre-stopped alternate" off.^[5]

Some of the consonants listed above only occur in clusters./n̺/ only occurs as a coda.

Damin consonant clusters at the beginning of a word arep'ny[ʘ↑n̠ʲ],p'ng[ʘ↑ŋ],fny[ɸn̠ʲ],fng[ɸŋ],fy[ɸj],prpry[ʙ\ʙj],thrr[t̻ɾ]. Words in normal Lardil may not begin with a cluster. However, Lardil has several clusters in the middle of words, and many of these are not found in Damin words, as Damin only allowsn[n̺] andrr[ɾ] in a syllable coda. The attested stem-medial Damin clusters arerrd, rrth, rrk, rrb, jb,^[12] thoughj ofjb is not otherwise allowed in coda position. Other clusters, such as nasal–stop, are produced by Lardil grammatical suffixes, and indeed the future suffix is-ngkur, which produces a three-consonant cluster after a coda, as onwijburrngkur 'firewood.FUT'.

Hale & Nash posit that the minimum Damin syllable shape is CVV or CCV. (In Lardil it is CVV.) Words they transcribe as monosyllabic CV are restricted to cases where C isk', ng*, l* ([kʼ],[ŋ̊],[ɬ↓ʔ]), suggesting that these are complex consonants, possibly underlyingly rearticulatedk2, ng2, l2 (/k\k,ŋ\ŋ,l\l/, rather as[ɕ] is an alternative realization ofj2/t̠ʲ\t̠ʲ/ and asthrr[t̻ɾ] might be analyzed asd2/t̺\t̺/). (Note however that some transcriptions do not record CV words, with CVV instead.)^[13] In polysyllabic words and compounds, however, long and short vowels appear to contrast, with one recorded minimal pair beingdidi 'to affect/harm' vsdiidi 'to act'^[14] (as in 'cut' firewood vs 'gather' firewood).^[15]

With only 150 roots in Damin, not all consonants occur before all three vowels. However, as several consonants and consonant clusters are attested from only a single root, there are certain to be accidental gaps, and it is not clear that any gaps are due to phonotactic constraints.

Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday language. With only about 150 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil or Yangkaal. It had only two pronouns (n!aa "me" (ego) andn!uu "not me" (alter)), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and usedkurri 'not' as anantonymic prefix (j2iwu "small",kurrij2iwu "large").

Grammatically, the Damin registers of the Lardil and Yangkaal use all the grammatical morphology of those languages, and so therefore are broadly similar, though it does not employ the phonologically conditioned alternations of that morphology.

Damin is spoken by replacing the lexical roots of ordinary Lardil with Damin words. Apart from a leveling of grammatical allomorphs, the grammar remains the same.

Some vocabulary:[16]

n!aa 'ego',n!uu 'alter'

kaa 'now',kaawi 'not now'

l*i 'bony fish',thii 'elasmobranch'

ngaajpu 'human',wuujpu 'animal',wiijpu 'wood' (incl. woody plants),kuujpu 'stone'

m!ii 'vegetable food',wii 'meat/food',^[c]n!2u 'liquid',thuu 'sea mammal',thuuwu 'land mammal'

didi 'harm (affect harmfully)',diidi 'act',kuudi 'see',kuuku 'hear, feel',yiidi 'be (in a place)',wiiwi 'burn',wiidi 'spear',ngaa 'die, decay',fyuu 'fall; the cardinal directions'

n!aa thuuku 'point on body',wii 'surface on body',nguu 'head',k'uu 'eye',nguuwii 'hand, foot'

thuuku 'one, another; place',kurrijpi 'two; hither, close; short'

Antonymic derivation withkurri 'not':

j2iwu 'small',kurrij2iwu 'large' (not small)

thuuku 'one',kurrithuuku 'many' (not one)

kurrijpi 'short',kurrikurrijpi 'long' (not short)

kawukawu 'light',kurrikawukawu 'heavy' (not light)

Specific reference requires paraphrasing. For example, a sandpiper is called a 'person-burning creature' (ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu 'human burn-NOM animal') in reference to its role as a character in the Rainbow Serpent Story, while a wooden axe is 'wood that (negatively) affects honey' (m!iwu didi-i-n wiijpu 'honey affect-PASS-NOM wood')

There is some suggestion of internal morphology or compounding, as suggested by the patterns in the word list above. For example,m!iwu '(native) beehive, honey' andwum!i 'sp. mud crab' may derive fromm!ii 'food' andwuu 'mud shell clam'.^{[clarification needed]}

• The ceremonial language Damin at theWayback Machine (archived July 16, 2012)

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