Ngadju

Ngadju Location

Ngadju is a language of the southern Goldfields region of Western Australia. There are very few speakers and these people are now spread across the Kalgoorlie region through to Esperance. Ngadju is centred around Norseman and east toward Balladonia.

Ngadju Name

A detailed language study of the language was undertaken by GALC linguist Dr. Marion Mullin over 2017-18. A phonology and sketch grammar were written and a dictionary which collates lexical items from historical documents cross referenced with speakers. These documents will be uploaded to this website mid 2018 and available.

As part of that phonological study, workshops were held with speakers and interred Ngadju people to examine the phonemic system and identify which letters should be used to represent the sounds. The writing of a standardised orthography has been approved by speakers and Elders. The alphabet uses the ‘j’ letting for the palatal approximate/glide. Previously, ‘dj’ was used. The approved and standardised alphabet now does not use the ‘dj’ any more.

However, Ngadju people have requested that the nation’s name stay written as ‘Ngadju’ as it has been widely adopted and recognised as such. For socio-linguistic reasons then, the name of the language and first nations group will continue to be written as ‘Ngadju’ using the ‘dj’ rather than just the ‘j’. This will be the only word in the language to use the ‘dj’ form.

Current Work on the Language

The first paper on the Ngadju language has been released by GALC. An Introduction to the Orthography and Grammatical Structure of the Ngaju Language was written by Marion Mullin and presented at the Dec 2017 Australian Linguistic Society’s annual conference as a paper. Note: The writing of the language name ‘Ngadju’ was determined by speakers prior to GALC’s linguistic work and is fixed using the past orthography with the dj spelling for the current j phoneme. The speakers have requested that the former spelling of the language name be retained.

GALC linguist, Dr. Marion Mullin (below at work), worked on the collection, linguistic analysis and databasing of the Ngadju language during 2017. The publication of a Ngadju dictionary is pending. The dictionary will contain a sketch grammar and some texts. Analysis and databasing of this language onto a Toolbox database is underway with over 1400 entries as of September 2017.

Ngadju Words

Here you can find some clips of Ngadju words spoken by two Ngadju speakers: Mrs Dimer and Mr. Graham.