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Bilinarra language

Australian Language Families

Bilinarra is a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngumpin branch of the Ngumpin-Yapa group, spoken by the Bilinarra people of the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is mutually intelligible with the neighboring Gurindji and Ngarinyman varieties, and its speaker base collapsed after massacres by early colonists and poor treatment on cattle stations, leaving only a single recorded native speaker in 2013; Ethnologue rates it as moribund. Grammatically it is a suffixation-only language with an ergative case system and uses reduplication to mark plurality and intensity.

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