| Description:
Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia. It is one of about 10% of Australian languages still being learned by children.
Traditional Tiwi, spoken by people over the age of fifty by 2005, is polysynthetic. However, this grammatical complexity has been lost among younger generations. According to Dixon (1980) there are around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated into verbs, most of them quite different from the corresponding free forms.
Unlike other Australian languages, which were once lumped together in a single language family, Tiwi has long been recognized as a language isolate.
As do most Australian languages, Tiwi has four phonetically distinct series of coronal stops. (See Indigenous Australian languages#Coronal consonants.) There are contrasting alveolar and postalveolar apical consonants, the latter often called retroflex. However, the two laminal series are in complementary distribution, with postalveolar laminal [t̠] (sometimes described as alveolo-palatal) occurring before the front vowel /i/, and denti-alveolar laminal [t̪] occurring before the non-front vowels, /a/, /o/, /u/. That is,..... full article at Wikipedia |