Martu Wangka is a Western Desert language variety of the Wati branch of the Pama-Nyungan family that developed as a koine in the 1960s when the Kartudjara and Manjiljarra peoples, speakers of two mutually intelligible Western Desert dialects, relocated together to the Jigalong community in northwest Western Australia. Their combined speech, spanning the Gibson, Little Sandy and Great Sandy deserts, fused elements of both ancestral dialects into a shared variety distinct from either. The 2021 census recorded 814 native speakers, and UNESCO classifies it as vulnerable.
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