Australia is home to some of the world’s most iconic wildlife. While we have covered some of Australia’s marsupials previously, this time, we will cover Australia’s birds. While there is the cassowary, a large flightless bird, there is also the bird that is named Australia’s national bird, the emu, and there is a whole group of bird species unique to Australia and New Guinea, among which one species can only be found in Australia. And that is the bird we will be covering today.
The Dacelo genus is traditionally used to group together this particular group of terrestrial kingfisher species called the kookaburra. While this group largely comprises of 5 species, only 2 of them can be found in Australia, with one of them being native to Australia. This is the laughing kookaburra, or Dacelo novaeguinae (which the species name quite ironically translates to ‘New Guinean’).
The laughing kookaburra has a rather iconic call, and it is something that you might encounter in the bush in eastern Australia. It is this call from which the name of this bird, kookaburra, is derived. The language of origin? That would be the Wiradjuri language, which contributed the word gugubarra. Interestingly, it is also the language that gave us the name of a city in New South Wales called Wagga Wagga. From an anglophone’s perspective, this name might come across as slightly unusual. But it has come to mean “dances and celebrations” or perhaps “drunken man” in the Wiradjuri language, instead of its previously potentially erroneous association with ‘a place of many crows’. This previous association, as argued by Wiradjuri speakers, would have been translated to Wagan Wagan.
The term Wiradjuri has a rather interesting etymology as well. It could be broken up into the elements wiray (no) + dhuray (having), literally translating as ‘no-having’. In a way, it is reminiscent of the Occitan language, which sort of means ‘language of yes’. It seems that this language is named by the term the people have for the word ‘no’, in contrast to the words for ‘yes’ used by speaking populations in France, Spain, and Italy. Another Aboriginal Australian language that also shares this etymological pattern is the Gamilaroi language, where they use the word gamil for ‘no’.
Perhaps another word that could trace its origins back to the Wiradjuri language is the rather familiar Australian clothing line called Billabong. This originates from the word bilabang, with bila meaning ‘river’. It supposedly refers to a river that only runs after a period of rain, though there is some debate over the exact meaning and origins of the –bang or –bung element in the word.
Wiradjuri is part of the Pama-Nyungan language family, like pretty much most of the Aboriginal Australian languages. Within that language family though, it belongs to the Wiradhuric branch, with its closest relatives being the Gamilaraay and Ngiyambaa languages. There are about 8 attested Wiradjuri dialects, though I am unsure about how they are split into bands or clans, which are smaller social organisations practiced by the Wiradjuri people.
The Wiradjuri language has a rather small phonological inventory typical of Aboriginal Australian languages, coming in with 15 consonants, 3 short vowels, and 3 long vowels. Unlike some Aboriginal Australian languages, Wiradjuri only has one retroflex consonant, the [ɻ] sound written as ‘r’. There is no voicing distinction in Wiradjuri, with ‘b’ indicating anything /b ~ p/. This also applies to ‘d’ and ‘g’, as /d ~ t/ and /g ~ k/ respectively.
Online resources covering the grammar of the Wiradjuri language are quite scant. Instead, there are some print-only resources available in national libraries, or on sale for 50-75 AUD, the last time I checked. There have been some mentions online about some grammar sketches made in the 19th century or early 20th century, but these records, if they exist, have yet to be digitised. Some inferences I could make regarding Wiradjuri grammar were largely done through consultation of the online Wiradjuri dictionary. Otherwise, physical and in-person resources such as language courses would be the go-to for those interested in thoroughly studying the Wiradjuri language for now.
For one, reduplication is a grammatical feature in Wiradjuri. This is used to indicate a larger degree or an intensifier of the thing that is reduplicated. Remember Wagga Wagga? This reduplication indicates an intensifier of the word Wagga, or ‘dance’. Similarly, the erroneous interpretation of Wagga Wagga would have translated to wagan wagan, with wagan meaning ‘crows’. The pattern seems to generally use full reduplications.
Nash also noted certain grammatical patterns reflected in place names of Wiradjuri origin, in this publication here. The suffix he noted largely pertained to the comitative suffix in Wiradjuri, which generally translates to ‘having’, -dhuray. Derivatives of this suffix can be found in place names in New South Wales such as Gilgandra, Jerilderie, and Coradgery. In his discussion, he also noted similar patterns captured in grammatical sketches of the 19th century, which noted some alternative transcriptions of -dhuray such as -durai giving the meaning of either the conjunctive case (meaning “and, with”) or “in company with”.
Wiradjuri uses a restricted number system, much in common with number systems amongst the indigenous Australian languages. Here, there are unique number terms for ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘five’, which are ngumbaay, bula, and marra (which also means hand) respectively. Another term for ‘five’ exists though, which translates to ‘toes’, dhina. Numbers like ‘three’ or ‘seven’ could be made by compounding these number terms together, usually placing the larger element first. So ‘three’ would be translated as ‘two one’, or bula-ngumbaay, and ‘seven’ would be ‘five two’, or marra bula. There is an alternative word for ‘four’, called bungu, although bula bula or bulabu bulabu could be allowed as well. The word bungu also means ‘many’, which could be fully reduplicated as bungubungu to mean ‘more’.
As noted in the Wiradjuri words of the number ‘four’, there is a construction suffixed by -bu (and) to make larger numbers. From what I can gather on this topic, the order in which the numbers are compounded together is reversed, and so the number ‘seven’ in this construction would translate as ‘two and five [and]’, or bulabu marrabu.
The Wiradjuri language today has been assessed to be ‘critically endangered’, but the number of native speakers vary wildly depending on source. Ethnologue does not include a precise number, instead suggesting that Wiradjuri has fewer than 10 000 speakers, which does not really inform us much about its endangerment status. The Endangered Languages Project, on the other hand, gives us more precise estimates, at 3-30 native speakers, but using data from 2007-2010. Wikipedia, on the other hand, gives us an uncited figure substantially higher than these estimates, at 1479 native speakers as of 2021. I later found this figure cited in the Australian census of 2021, and realised that it has actually come a long way in its revitalisation efforts. The 2006 census only cited 92 native speakers of Wiradjuri, 136 in the 2011 census, and 432 in the 2016 census. From census data alone, there is some optimism in the language’s revitalisation and survival.
There is also a growing amount of digital resources covering the Wiradjuri language, with one of the most prominent projects being the Wiradjuri language dictionary. Initially published in 2005 by Wiradjuri elder Uncle Stan Grant and academic John Rudder, the dictionary has received a revised edition in 2010, with its digitisation as online and mobile versions coming several years later, based on the 2010 edition of the dictionary.
Additionally, Charles Sturt University also features the Wiradjuri Language and Cultural Heritage Recovery Project, with the main aim being the preservation of the Wiradjuri language for generations to come. This project also includes the development of a graduate certificate course in this topic, which commenced in 2014, available only to domestic students. Combined with ongoing education in primary and secondary schools in Wiradjuri-speaking areas in New South Wales, there is considerable language transmission to the younger generations, which contributed to the rise in native speakers of Wiradjuri over time. Thus, there is certainly some optimism to be had about Wiradjuri’s revitalisation and survival in future generations.
Further Reading
Wiradjuri Workbook Ngumbaay, Riley-McNaboe & Riley, 2022
https://drupal.prod.sbs.com.au/sites/sbs.com.au.home/files/sbs_learn_wiradjuriworkbook_1_digital.pdf.
https://drupal.prod.sbs.com.au/sites/sbs.com.au.home/files/sbs_learn_wiradjuriworkbook_2_digital.pdf.
Wiradjuri online dictionary, based on the dictionary by Grant & Rudder, 2010
https://wiradjuri.wcclp.com.au/
Wiradjuri cultural notes, Greenword,
Account of Wiradjuri language introduction in Parkes, NSW, Anderson, 2016
The Language Closet 