There are many names given to administrative divisions around the world. We are familiar with states, counties, provinces, parishes, prefectures, arrondissements, boroughs, districts and so on, but today, we will look at the administrative division called a shire.

We are generally familiar with the regions associated with this word, most likely as a suffix, and predominantly in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States to some extent. Yorkshire, Berkshire, Bedfordshire, these are all names of administrative divisions in England that have the suffix ‘-shire’. This name is also given as an administrative division in Australia, and it is in this very country where we could find the world’s largest shire.

If you go on an extremely long road trip in the state of Western Australia, you might want to pop by Marble Bar. Just outside this very settlement, is a road marker that claims the Shire of East Pilbara to be the largest shire in the world. And this has some strong backing to it. At 372 571 square kilometers, the Shire of East Pilbara is almost the size of the entirety of Japan, and it is larger than all but 62 countries of the world. Yet, only around 10000 people reside in this shire, giving a population density of around 0.03 people per square kilometer. But this is not the most sparsely populated shire in Australia. Within the same state, in the Shire of Sandstone, a local government area of around 32 882 square kilometers in size, only around 100 people call it home today. That is a population density of around 0.003 people per square kilometer.

Yet, the Shire of East Pilbara has quite a long history of indigenous people settlement. Earliest estimations put the time of first human settlement to be around 45 000 years ago, and today, the predominant people group in this shire is the Martu people, and some Niabali communities also reside in East Pilbara.

The Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre lists 31 languages spoken in the Pilbara region, but the predominant languages spoken in the Shire of East Pilbara are the variants of the Western Desert language or Wati. Ngayarta languages like Nyiyaparli, spoken by the Niabali are also spoken in East Pilbara settlements such as Jigalong and Newman. But among the varieties of the Western Desert language spoken in East Pilbara, perhaps one dialect stands out, that is, Martu Wangka. So today, we will look into Martu Wangka, which is perhaps, one of the youngest variants of the Western Desert language.

But first, the Western Desert language is best described as a dialect cluster which belongs to the Pama-Nyungan language family. There are some variants that have been classified as separate languages, and even assigned their own ISO 639-3 codes. This includes Pitjantjatjara (pit) and Ngaanyatjarra (ntj), but the wider consensus is that, these ‘languages’, as with many other variants, are largely mutually intelligible amongst native speakers. Together, the total number of native speakers number in the thousands, making the Western Desert language among the most widely spoken, and relatively thriving, indigenous Australian languages.

Martu Wangka has around a thousand native speakers today, and it can trace its origins back to the mid-20th century. With different Western Desert language-speaking people groups, particularly the Kartudjara and the Manjiljarra living together in Jigalong, the various elements of the interacting dialects and languages influenced and became incorporated into what would become Martu Wangka. It is not really clear to me which parts of Martu Wangka are influenced by which corresponding dialect, but it is known that Martu Wangka combines some elements of Manyjilyjarra and Kartujarra with some Putijarra, Warnman and Nyiyaparli. Thus, Martu Wangka could be best described as a ‘communalect’, from its evolution through cohabitation of various people groups.

This communalect also goes by another name, although there is some debate as to how it is actually written. The primary resource covering the dialect in greater detail, by Barbara Jones published in 2011, mentions the spelling Wangkajunga, breaking down into “correct language”. For purposes of this introduction though, we will continue to use the name Martu Wangka due to their more agreed upon way of spelling.

The sounds of Martu Wangka are, to put it bluntly, fairly typical of the sounds you would expect to encounter in the indigenous Australian languages. A small vowel inventory distinguished by length (Martu Wangka has 3 phonemic vowels which are further distinguished by length), a consonant system that lacks any fricatives, so no [s] or [f] sounds, and a system of retroflex consonants. Words tend to end in vowels, although a CVC or CVVC syllable structure may be allowed. To make these syllables into words that end in vowels, an epenthetic sound or ‘linking sound’ is used to link the two syllables together in the word, -pa.

As with many Pama-Nyungan and Aboriginal Australian languages, Martu Wangka and its other dialects of the Western Desert language have a system of ergative-absolutive alignment. It also has a dative case, marked by the suffix -ku, which indicates the purpose of an action. I should probably get a Made Simple post on morphosyntactic alignment that breaks down what this alignment actually means. Other suffixes which are also technically cases include those that indicate motion towards, away, along a path, or in some location.

The wealth of case endings allows Martu Wangka and the Western Desert language to have a relatively free word order. Instead of imparting some grammatical function in how the words are ordered, word order in Martu Wangka conveys an emphasis of a certain word over other elements in the clause or sentence. In a way, it sounds like a system of topicalisation, but not quite. In speech, important information would be given the first priority in a sentence. And as the conversation or narrative progresses, new information would enter the picture, which would be treated as important, and would be ordered towards the first elements in the sentence or clause.

However, question formation generally follows a more rigid word order, and that would depend on the nature of the question asked. For yes/no questions, the question word would come towards the end of the sentence as -kurlu. But for question words like ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’, these words would come first in the question.

Martu Wangka has a restricted numeral system, with no number terms going beyond ‘two’, with ‘one’ being kuju, and ‘two’ being kujarra. To express larger quantities conveniently, Martu Wangka has borrowed the decimal numeral system that English has, along with terms for higher numerals such as a thousand. However, these loanwords are adapted to suit Martu Wangka or Western Desert language phonology, leading words like ‘hundred’ translating to yantarta in Martu Wangka. But perhaps you can still see the similarities there.

When reading further about Martu Wangka, I also came across an article briefly covering the features of colour terms in the dialect, which I have linked in further reading. In short, Martu Wangka is purported to have two basic colour terms, with “white” or “bright colours” translating to miji-miji, and “black” or “dark colours” translating to maru-maru. To express more specific colours like ‘yellow’ or ‘red’, a ‘looks like [something]’ construction is used. For ‘yellow’, that could be yellow ochre, and for ‘red’, that could be blood. As such, ‘yellow’, or more accurately speaking, ‘yellow ochre-like’, would translate as karntawarra in Martu Wangka.

General population trends in the settlements of The Shire of East Pilbara seem to be in decline, with possible reasons include emigration to larger towns or cities that have much better infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and access to food. And so, when compounded with the dominance of English in Australia, there are concerns surrounding the survival of the Western Desert language in the long term. These concerns seem to be rebutted by the rather decent transmission of the indigenous language to younger generations through education, and the presence of documentation and literature on the language. Wangka Martu is still particularly strong, as it remains as the first language of some Martu children, and many Martu adults.

However, some biases do exist, as such literature may focus on a few dialects over many others. Pitjantjatjara, spoken mainly in South Australia, is one such example of a Western Desert dialect that has extensive transmission through literature and education. Nevertheless, the Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre is committed to document and promote the indigenous languages of the Pilbara region, part of their goal to ensure cultural continuity in its indigenous communities. We will revisit this topic some time later, as we shift our focus onto Nyiyaparli, another indigenous language spoken in the Shire of East Pilbara.

Further reading

An overview of Martu Wangka, from the Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre

https://www.wangkamaya.org.au/pilbara-languages/martu-wangka.

Martu Wangka grammar

Jones, B. (2011) A grammar of Wangkajunga: a language of the Great Sandy Desert of north Western Australia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 9780858836488.

Martu Wangka colour terms

Wierzbicka, A. (2005). There Are No “Color Universals” but There Are Universals of Visual Semantics. Anthropological Linguistics, 47(2), 217–244. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25132327.