The Torres Strait Islands contain two of the more unusual examples of indigenous Australian languages. Quite a while ago, we have seen the Kala Lagaw Ya language, which I had remarked as being unusual, as it contained some sounds unusual to the Australian languages, as well as its rather low proportion of cognates with its closest language cousin. Today, we will look at another unusual indigenous Australian language spoken in the Torres Strait Islands, more specifically, the islands Mer, Waier and Dauar, Erub, and Ugar. This time, the unusual descriptor goes to the fact that this language might just be the only language in Australia that belongs to the Papuan languages. This is Meriam Mir.

Meriam Mir is an Eastern Trans-Fly language, making it related to some languages in the Oriomo Plateau in Papua New Guinea. However, classifying the Trans-Fly languages is a big mess, with some debate if the Eastern Trans-Fly languages should be part of the Trans-Fly language phylum. Nevertheless, we see Meriam Mir sharing a fair bit more proportion of its words as cognates with its Eastern Trans-Fly languages, at 78%, while other words are cognates with indigenous Australian languages.

Interestingly, it shares about 40% of its words with its geographical language neighbour, Kala Lagaw Ya, which covers many kinds of words including time. Thus, in a way, we could infer possible interactions between the Eastern and Western Torres Strait Islanders in their histories. For more modern loanwords, Meriam Mir tends to borrow from English and the Torres Strait Creole, though there are some borrowings from Austronesian languages, and interestingly, Japanese.

With only around 200 native speakers, Meriam Mir is endangered. However, there are action plans to revitalise the language, as with the Kala Lagaw Ya language. However, formal education in Meriam Mir has not quite materialised yet, although there is a push towards achieving that.

When we look at the sounds of Meriam Mir, we might be tempted to prescribe our preconceptions of “typical” sounds and note that Meriam Mir does not seem to have any unusual phonemes. After all, it differentiates voicing in the stop consonants /k/, /t/, and /p/, as well as the fricative sound /s/. Its consonants are also quite typical among the Eastern Trans-Fly languages. However, if we compare this with the consonants amongst the indigenous Australian languages, that is where we see some difference. For example, Meriam Mir differentiates between voicing in consonants, while Australian languages typically do not, and Meriam Mir contains sibilant consonants, while Australian languages tend not to contain them, with one of the few exceptions being Kala Lagaw Ya. Sources differ on the vowels differentiated by Meriam Mir. One of them proposes a 5-vowel system, while another suggests 8-10.

Meriam Mir uses this alignment called split ergativity, where in some situations an ergative-absolutive alignment is used, while in others, a nominative-accusative alignment is used instead. If you need a brief explanation on ergative-absolutive, I have a little section in my introduction to Chukchi last month, so please check it out. In Meriam Mir, this ergative-absolutive alignment is used for common nouns like fish and canoes, but the nominative-accusative alignment is used for proper nouns like Bob and Steve, and pronouns like you and I. This sort of alignment system is not unusual in Australian languages, as its neighbouring language to the west, Kala Lagaw Ya, also uses a similar alignment, but implements it in a slightly different manner compared to Meriam Mir.

There is an interesting difficulty in distinction noted by Piper regarding adjectives, as adjectives could also be used as nouns. Hunter’s essay calls this class of words “modifiers” instead, noting some examples such as quantifiers and specific words denoting “big” or “old”, “little” or “young”, “good” and “bad”. Intensifier words like kaka could be used to further give detail to a certain modifier. A similar difficulty was noted for adverbs as well, as Piper could only identify two adverbs, nab “attempt unsuccessfully”, and mirem “attempt”, though there are other grammatical structures and expressions that could serve a similar adverbial function.

Like plenty of Papuan languages in New Guinea and Australia, Meriam Mir has a binary number system. That is, it only has number terms for “one” and “two”. From this source, it seems that this number system is restricted as well, making it impractical to express large quantities precisely like 57 or 125. So here are the number terms, all two of them! “One” is netat, while “two” is neis. If you want to go higher and express “three”, you would say neis a netat, quite literally “two and one”.

Reading up on this topic was quite difficult. Resources concerning Meriam Mir are quite scarce, and reference grammars few and extremely far between temporally. There was one I found which dated back to 1891, and the primary contemporary reference grammar was covered by Nick Piper in 1989, 1994, and 2013. Accessing all of these proved difficult as well; the link to Piper’s reference grammar on the Australian National University Open Research Repository seems to be broken, and the most reliable way to find this copy is through print sources that costs more than 90 euros on Amazon, or in their libraries in person, most locations of which are in Australia. Even the Torres Strait Island Language Plan website was not really informative, other than to spread awareness of Meriam Mir and Kala Lagaw Ya, and their revitalisation projects. And so, my primary resources on more details about the grammar of Meriam Mir include a senior essay by Jessica Hunter in 2010.

The issue is, with this scarcity of resources and documentation, some grammatical features of Meriam Mir might not be exactly accurate, and pends further studies to further elucidate how these features work. Generally speaking, this is pretty much what we currently know about Meriam Mir, with a focus on the more special features of the language as we see it from the anglosphere. As such, it could be a race against time to gather resources and further documentation of the language so that revitalisation and other linguistic studies can be implemented in full swing for Meriam Mir. This pattern is not unique amongst the Papuan languages, quite the contrary. There are perhaps dozens or even hundreds of Papuan languages that have insufficient documentation beyond word lists, which could be in similar circumstances as Meriam Mir is today. Hopefully, today’s introduction has shed some light on Meriam Mir, and I hope you have learned a thing or two from today’s exploration.