Tiwi

Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by the Tiwi people on Bathurst and Melville Islands off the coast of Australia's Northern Territory, with about 2,103 native speakers recorded in the 2021 census, and it remains among the roughly 10 percent of Australian languages still regularly learned by children. Traditional Tiwi was a polysynthetic language with complex verb morphology and noun incorporation involving around 100 incorporable nominals, while Modern Tiwi, spoken especially by younger people, has shifted toward a simpler, more isolating structure. Tiwi has long been treated as a language isolate, but recent research has proposed placing it within this atlas's already-live Macro-Gunwinyguan family of north-central Australia, a classification not yet settled.