Verbs are pretty much a universal occurrence in natural languages across the world. After all, their main function in a clause or sentence is to express a certain action, a certain state, or a certain occurrence in relation to other constituent parts of a sentence. But languages treat verbs differently from other languages, with some supposedly having fewer verbs than others.
When I tried to explore the extremities of the number of verbs in a language, I have come across some rather bizarre results. For example, in the island of New Guinea, there is a branch in the Madang language family called the Kalam languages that have an unusually small set of lexical verbs. Only up to a hundred or two. For example, Kobon is purported to have up to 120 verbs. In total.
One would expect a language with an extremely small number of verbs to have very general meanings, like “to go”, “to have”, “to sense”, “to consume” and so on, and this is quite generally the case. To have more specific meanings, these verbs have to be attached to other kinds of words like nouns. To produce the verb “to hear”, one might use the verb “to sense” with the word “ear” (or some grammatical variant of it).
But then, we reach the extreme end of this verb spectrum. In Australia, there is a language said to have only 3 verbs. Part of the Mirndi language family, spoken in Elliot in the Northern Territory of Australia, this language is called Jingulu (or Djingili). It is a moribund language today, with around a dozen native speakers left, most of whom are older adults. While I am unable to find publicised efforts to revive or revitalise the Jingulu language, I believe that there are Jingulu speakers who desire to transmit their language to fellow Jingili people and beyond.
The Jingulu language is perhaps most notable for its extraordinarily small set of verbs. Upon learning about the Jingulu language, I found this feature to be somewhat bizarre, or if not, sensationalised in trivia circles. Surely Jingulu has more than three verbs, right? Thus, I had to read further into this. Firstly, what are the three verbs Jingulu speakers have to work with?
These are the verbs “to go”, “to come” and “to do / be”. In fact, the forms for these verbs across all of Jingulu’s tenses can be summarised in this table. There is also a distant past tense, but that is primarily used in storytelling or the telling of oral traditions, and not quite used in daily conversation.
| Tense \ Verb | “to go” | “to come” | “to do / be” |
| Past | -rruku | -jiyimi | -nu |
| Present | -ardu | -miki | -ju |
| Future | -wa | -nguku | -yi |
But surely there has to be some way to form more specific verbs, right?
This is where we are introduced to new grammatical terms. Remember the term lexical verb mentioned earlier? This is defined as a verb that carries some sort of semantic meaning, like “to eat”, “to inhale”, and “to banish”. This is in contrast to the auxiliary verb, which only carries grammatical meaning, like “shall”, “might”, and “would”. Lexical verbs are usually an open class of words, where new words can be added to the class, while auxiliary verbs are usually a closed class of words, where new words are not usually added if at all. Jingulu’s verbs are an extreme example of a closed class of verbs.
In Jingulu, these verbs are all used as this thing called light verbs. These are verbs that contribute to the meaning of a larger element of a clause called a predicate, and on their own, they do not carry that much of a semantic meaning. They usually depend on a co-verb or a similar element to enrich the overall meaning, or form a more specific expression. Nevertheless, using a different light verb as part of predicate may change the overall meaning entirely.
To illustrate this with a more familiar example, we could take a look at an example in Japanese. In Japanese, there is no lexical verb that has the meaning “to study”. The workaround to convey the meaning of the intended expression “to study” in Japanese would be to use the words “study (noun)” and the verb “to do” as a light verb. “Study” is 勉強 (benkyō), while the verb “to do” is する (suru). Putting these together using the verbal structure [noun] + [light verb], we get the meaning “to study” as 勉強する (benkyō suru). Suru alone here does not really contribute much a semantic meaning, other than the fact that something is actually done. Most of the heavy lifting in the semantic department is done by benkyō.
In a similar vein, the verbal structure of Jingulu is [co-verb] + [other inflections] + [light verb], and these co-verbs may translate to nouns, adjectives, or even verbs in English. For example, to say “I spoke about” in Jingulu, the main elements to convey this expression are [speak], [I, nominative], [I, verb inflection], and [light verb to do, past tense]. Respectively, these are ambaya, ngaya, nga-, and -nu. Putting these together, we have “Ambaya ngaya nga-nu“. These inflectional element may change to reflect the mood and aspect, something that the light verb does not inflect for on its own. Come think of it, the light verb does not even inflect for tense at all; it uses an entirely different form for each tense instead.
But among these elements of the Jingulu verbal structure, only the light verb is essential, as it is the element that conveys some form of motion in relation to the subject or the object in the clause. However, the coverbal root or the subject inflection must precede this light verb. Thus, it is possible to say “let’s go” in Jingulu using only two of the three elements of the Jingulu verbal structure, ngurru-wa. Interestingly, the three light verbs of Jingulu are distinguished by motion, “to come” indicates a motion towards, “to go” indicates a motion away, while “to do / be” indicates a lack thereof, or a neutral motion.
Interestingly, nominalisation, the process where nouns are formed from actions or motions, is typically formed using the co-verbal root. Similarly, adverbs are also formed using the co-verbal root, and I am unable to find an example where the light verb is used, but this is most likely due to the fact that the co-verbal root contributes most of the semantic meaning.
So, does Jingulu really only have three verbs? Technically, as most linguists might tend to agree, yes. The light verbs of Jingulu, which also constitute all of the verbs of Jingulu, do indeed tick off the boxes of what a verb essentially is. However, Jingulu tends to rely far more heavily on co-verbs to further enrich the semantic meaning in a predicate than many other languages we are familiar with.
Weirdly enough, the Jingulu language has inspired a group of researchers to develop some form of communicating language between a human and an artificial intelligence, and demonstrated the capability of this language in swarm guidance. It is quite an interesting development, as it tries to adapt the verbal structure used in Jingulu in a computerised context. I will link this article in the Further Reading section at the bottom, so please check it out.
Further reading
Abbass, H.A., Petraki, E. and Hunjet, R. (2022) ‘JSwarm: A Jingulu-inspired human-AI-teaming language for context-aware swarm guidance’, Frontiers in Physics, 10. doi:10.3389/fphy.2022.944064.
Meakins, F., Pensalfini, R., Zipf, C. & Hamilton-Hollaway, A. (2020) ‘Lend me your verbs: Verb borrowing between Jingulu and Mudburra’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 40:3, 296-318, DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2020.1804830.
Jingulu grammar, PhD thesis by R. J. Pensalfini, 1997.
The Language Closet 