Wagaydyic languages

Wagaydyic
Geographic
distribution		Daly River
Linguistic classificationNorthern Daly ?
Subdivisions
GlottologNone
wadj1254  (covered by Wadjiginy)

The Wagaydyic languages (nowadays more often referred to as the Anson Bay languages[1]) are a pair of closely related but otherwise unclassified Australian Aboriginal languages: the moribund Wadjiginy (also known as Wagaydy and Batjamalh) and the extinct Kandjerramalh (Pungupungu).

Tryon (1980) notes that the two languages are 79% cognate based on a 200-item wordlist, but there are serious grammatical differences that prevent them from being considered dialects of a single language.[2][3]

The unattested Giyug may have been a dialect of Wadjiginy or otherwise related.[4]

The Wagaydyic languages have previously been classified with Malak-Malak into a Northern Daly family, but similarities appear to be due to lexical and morphological borrowing from Malak-Malak, at least in Wadjiginy.[citation needed]

  1. ^ Nordlinger, Rachel. 2017. "The languages of the Daly River region (Northern Australia)." In Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun, & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Oxford handbook of polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  2. ^ N11 Pungupungu at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
  3. ^ Tryon, Darrell. 1980. "Pungupungu and Wadyiginy: Typologically Constrastive Dialects." In Bruce Rigsby and Peter Sutton (eds.), Papers in Australian Linguistics No.~13: Contributions to Australian Linguistics, 277-287. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
  4. ^ N226 Giyug at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies