Martuthunira language

Martuthunira is an extinct Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngayarda branch, traditionally spoken by the Mardudunera people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia around the Fortescue River, whose name it takes. Its last fluent speaker, Algy Paterson, died on 6 August 1995, but from 1980 he worked with linguist Alan Dench to document the language, and most surviving knowledge of it comes from that collaboration. Unlike most Australian languages, which are ergative, Martuthunira has accusative case alignment and shows case stacking, where a noun can carry more than one case suffix at once.