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Mbabaram
Barbaram
Mbabaɽam
Native to	Australia
Region	Queensland
Ethnicity	Mbabaram
Extinct	1972, with the death of Albert Bennett[1]
Language family	Pama–Nyungan Paman Southern Paman Mbabaram
Language codes
ISO 639-3	vmb
Glottolog	mbab1239
AIATSIS[2]	Y115
ELP	Mbabaram
Traditional lands of the Aboriginal peoples aroundCairns; Mbabaram in  cyan.
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

Mbabaram (Barbaram) is anextinctAustralian Aboriginal language of northQueensland. It was the traditional language of theMbabaram people. Recordings are held in the Audiovisual Archive of theAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.R. M. W. Dixon described his hunt for a native speaker of Mbabaram in his bookSearching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker. Most of what is known of the language is from Dixon's field research with speaker Albert Bennett.

UntilR. M. W. Dixon's work on the language, "Barbaram" (as it was then known) was thought to be too different from other languages to be part of the Pama–Nyungan language family. Dixon revealed it to have descended from a more typical form, that was obscured by subsequent changes. Dixon (2002) himself, however, still regardsgenetic relationships between Mbabaram and other languages as unproven.

Mbabaram was spoken by theMbabaram tribe inQueensland, southwest ofCairns (17°20′S145°0′E / 17.333°S 145.000°E /-17.333; 145.000).

Nearby tribal dialects wereAgwamin,Djangun (Kuku-Yalanji),Muluridji (Kuku-Yalanji),Djabugay,Yidiny,Ngadjan (Dyirbal),Mamu (Dyirbal),Jirrbal (Dyirbal),Girramay (Dyirbal), andWarungu. While these were oftenmutually intelligible, to varying degrees, with the speech of the adjacent tribes, none were even partially intelligible with Mbabaram. The Mbabaram would often learn the languages of other tribes rather than vice versa, because Mbabaram was found difficult.

Mbabaram would have originally had simply three vowels,/iau/, like most Australian languages, but several changes occurred to add/ɛɨɔ/ to the system:

• [ɔ] developed from original*/a/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with*/ɡ/,*/ŋ/, or*/wu/.
• [ɛ] developed from original*/a/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with*/ɟ/. (It may have also occurred with/ɲ/ or/ji/, but no examples are known.)
• [ɨ] developed from original*/i/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with*/ɡ/,*/ŋ/, or*/w/.
• [ɨ] also developed from original*/u/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with*/ɟ/,*/ɲ/, or*/j/.

The first consonant of each word was then dropped, leaving the distribution of/ɔɛɨ/ unpredictable.

• dog (dog), unrelated to the English word
• gungdg (kookaburra)
• yú (fish)^[3], unrelated to mandarin yú (鱼)

Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its vocabulary. When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation,dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in factdúg,^[4] pronounced almost identically to theAustralian English word (compare true cognates such asYidinygudaga,Dyirbalguda,Djabugaygurraa andGuugu Yimidhirrgudaa, for example^[5]). The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and otherfalse cognates have been cited by typological linguistBernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.^[6]

• Dixon, R. M. W. (1966). "Mbabaram: A Dying Australian Language".Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.29 (1):97–121.doi:10.1017/S0041977X00060833.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (1972).The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland.Cambridge University Press. p. 348.ISBN 978-0-521-08510-6.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (1991). "Mbabaram". In Dixon, R. M. W.; Blake, B. J. (eds.).Handbook of Australian Languages. Vol. 4. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (2002).Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development. Cambridge University Press.

• Bibliography of Mbabaram language and people resources, at theAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

• Southern Pama languages
• Extinct languages of Queensland
• Coincidence

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles lacking in-text citations from December 2011
• All articles lacking in-text citations
• Articles containing Barbaram-language text
• Extinct ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue
• Pages using gadget WikiMiniAtlas
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles containing Yidiny-language text
• Articles containing Dyirbal-language text
• Articles containing Djabugay-language text
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