| Lower Arrernte | |
|---|---|
| Lower Aranda, Lower Southern Arrernte | |
| Alenjerntarrpe | |
| Native to | Australia |
| Region | South-EasternNorthern Territory, northernSouth Australia |
| Extinct | 2011, with the death ofBrownie Doolan[1] |
| Revival | by 2020 |
Pama–Nyungan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | axl |
| Glottolog | lowe1436 |
| AIATSIS[2] | C29 |
| ELP | Lower Southern Aranda |
Lower Arrernte, also known asLower Southern Arrernte,Lower Aranda,Lower Southern Aranda andAlenjerntarrpe, is an extinctArandic language (but not of theArrernte language group). Lower Arrernte was spoken in theFinke River area, near theOverland Telegraph Line station atCharlotte Waters, just north of the border betweenSouth Australia and theNorthern Territory, and in theDalhousie area in S.A.[3] It had been extinct since the last speaker died in 2011, but there is now alanguage revival project under way.
By 2007 only one person was known to speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation:Brownie Doolan Perrurle (1918–2011), known as Brownie Doolan.Gavan Breen, an Australianlinguist, was able to compile a dictionary of Lower Arrernte comprising about a thousand words by recording talks he had with Doolan.[4]
As of 2020[update], Lower Southern Arrernte is one of 20 languages prioritised as part of the Priority Languages Support Project, being undertaken by First Languages Australia and funded by theDepartment of Communications and the Arts. The project aims to "identify and document critically-endangered languages — those languages for which little or no documentation exists, where no recordings have previously been made, but where there are living speakers".[5]
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