| Barranbinja | |
|---|---|
| Barranbinya | |
| Native to | Australia |
| Region | New South Wales |
| Ethnicity | Barranbinya |
| Extinct | 1979, with the death of Emily Margaret Horneville |
Pama–Nyungan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | barr1252 |
| AIATSIS[1] | D26 |
 Barranbinja (green) among other Pama–Nyungan languages (tan) | |
Barranbinja orBarrabinya is an extinctAustralian Aboriginal language ofNew South Wales.[2] The last speaker was probably Emily Margaret Horneville (d. 1979), who was recorded by Lynette Oates who then published a short description of it.[3] It had also been recorded byR.H. Mathews along withMuruwari,[4] though not all items in his wordlist were recognised by Horneville. Both Mathews and Oates conclude that Barranbinya andMuruwari were in a dialect relation.
Lynette Oates' work onMuruwari andBarranbinya gives a cognate count of 44% between the two varieties, concluding that both were likely in a dialect relation.[3]R.H. Mathews (1903), who recorded both Muruwari and Barranbinya, also commented that besides vocabulary differences, the grammar of both Muruwari and Barranbinya were essentially the same.[4]
Together, Muruwari and Barranbinya form an isolate group within thePama-Nyungan language family, and were very different in many respects from their geographic neighbours (which belong to many different Pama-Nyungan subgroups).[3] For more information, see the description forMuruwari.
The phonemic inventory is very similar to Muruwari, although the relative paucity of data means that the status of many phonemes is not clear (in round brackets).[3]
| Peripheral | Apical | Laminal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Velar | Labial | Retroflex | Alveolar | Palatal | Dental | |
| Stops | ⟨g⟩/k/ | ⟨b⟩/p/ | ⟨rd⟩*/ʈ/ | ⟨d⟩/t/ | ⟨dy⟩*/c/ | ⟨dh⟩/t̪/ |
| Nasals | ⟨ng⟩/ŋ/ | ⟨m⟩/m/ | ⟨rn⟩*/ɳ/ | ⟨n⟩/n/ | ⟨ny⟩*/ɲ/ | ⟨nh⟩/n̪/ |
| Laterals | (⟨rl⟩*/ɭ/) | ⟨l⟩*/l/ | (⟨ly⟩*/ʎ/) | (⟨lh⟩*/l̪/) | ||
| Rhotics | ⟨r⟩*/ɻ/ | (⟨R⟩*/ɾ/) | ||||
| ⟨rr⟩*/r/ | ||||||
| Semivowels | ⟨w⟩/w/ | ⟨y⟩/j/ | ||||
All phonemes except those with a star (*) may be word-initial.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | ⟨i⟩/i/, ⟨ii⟩/iː/ | ⟨u⟩/u/, ⟨uu⟩/uː/ | |
| Low | ⟨a⟩/a/, ⟨aa⟩/aː/ |
Nearly all words end in a vowel, though there are some rare occurrences of word-final -ny and -n, which is in stark contrast with neighbouring Muruwari andNgiyambaa, where word-finalnasals andapproximants are very common. Oates speculates that this may be the result of influence fromPaakantyi and other western languages, which also display a preference for word-final vowels.