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Yindjibarndi language

Australian Language Families

Yindjibarndi is a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngayarda branch, spoken in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and described by linguists as the most conservative surviving descendant of the proto-Ngayarda language. It has roughly 1,000 speakers, a relatively large number for the region, in part because many Ngarluma people adopted Yindjibarndi after colonial-era displacement forced communities together in Roebourne. It is mutually intelligible with the neighboring Kurrama dialect, and its vocabulary includes spatial and landscape concepts that speakers say have no direct equivalent in English.

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