Phonology; morphology; syntax; list comparing Mangala words with Capells Common Australian Word List.

The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their mother tongue and usual language of communication. This book describes the Aboriginal languages spoken today and in the recent past in this region.

Gives location, variant spelling, classification, linguistic situation, research and bibliographic information for all languages in regions south of Kimberleys; notes on Aboriginal English and Kriol; extensive annotated bibliography; indexes to variant language spellings, and to linguists.

Mushin provides the first full grammatical description of Garrwa, a critically endangered language of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region in Northern Australia. Garrwa is typologically interesting because of its uncertain status in the Australian language family, its pronouns and its word order syntax. This book covers Garrwa phonology, morphology and syntax, with a particular focus on the use of grammar in discourse. The grammatical description is supplemented with a word list and text collection, including transcriptions of ordinary conversation.

There are no longer any speakers of the West Australian Aboriginal language Malgana who have any degree of fluency, and the series of analyses in this report are based on data from audio tapes made in the middle of the last decade of the 20th century, as well as various written materials produced over more than 150 years. This grammar is therefore an attempt to salvage from the scarce material available as complete a description of Malgana as possible. Nevertheless, the character of Malgana shines through what remains. For example, typical of Pama-Nyungan languages in general, Malgana exhibits split-ergative nominal marking, and of Aboriginal languages of the central West of Australia in particular, Malgana displays a full contrastive laminal series of stops in its phonology. A conscious effort has been made to provide in this grammar as many resources as possible for the researcher interested in comparative study of the surrounding languages. To this end, a (Malgana-based) comparative wordlist has been constructed for the languages of the region centring on the Murchison River: Malgana, Nhanda, Badimaya, Wajarri, and (Southern and Northern) Yingkarta.