Dyirbal ( ; also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were eight speakers of the language in 2016 and 24 speakers in 2021.
Dialects
There are many different groups speaking dialects of Dyirbal language. Researcher Robert Dixon estimates that Dyirbal had, at its peak, 10 dialects.
Dialects include:) spoken by the Dyirbalŋan
- Mamu, spoken by the Waɽibara, Dulgubara, Bagiɽgabara, Dyiɽibara, and Mandubara
- III – edible fruit and vegetables
- IV – miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labelled "feminine" (II) inspired the title of George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Some linguists distinguish between such systems of classification and the gendered division of items into the categories of "feminine", "masculine" and (sometimes) "neuter" that is found in, for example, many Indo-European languages.
Dyirbal shows a split-ergative system. Sentences with a first or second person pronoun have their verb arguments marked for case in a pattern that mimics nominative–accusative languages. That is, the first or second person pronoun appears in the least marked case when it is the subject (regardless of the transitivity of the verb), and in the most marked case when it is the direct object. Thus Dyirbal is morphologically accusative in the first and second persons, but morphologically ergative elsewhere; and it is still always syntactically ergative.
Taboo
There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people. Speakers were forbidden from speaking with their cross-cousins of the opposite sex due to the fact that those relatives were of the section from which an individual must marry, but were too close of kin to choose as a spouse so the avoidance might have been on the grounds of indicating anyone sexually unavailable. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the standard language except for four lexical items referring to grandparents on the mother and father's side.
The taboo relationship was reciprocal. Thus, an individual was not allowed to speak with one's own mother-in-law and it was equally taboo for the mother-in-law to speak to her son-in-law. For example, in Dyalŋuy the verb 'to ask' is . In Guwal, 'to ask' is , 'to invite someone over' is , 'to invite someone to accompany one' is and 'to keep asking after having already been told' is . There are no correspondences to the other three verbs of Guwal in Dyalŋuy.
The lexical items found in Dyalŋuy were mainly derived from three sources: "borrowings from the everyday register of neighbouring dialects or languages, the creation of new [Dyalŋuy] forms by phonological deformation of lexemes from the language's own everyday style, and the borrowing of terms that were already in the [Dyalŋuy] style of a neighboring language or dialect".
An example of borrowing between dialects is the word for sun in the Yidin and Ngadyan dialects. In Yidin, the Guwal style word for sun is [buŋan], and this same word was also the Dyalŋuy style of the word for sun in the Ngadyan dialect.
Young Dyirbal is grammatically distinct from Traditional Dyirbal, in some cases being more similar to English, such as the gradual loss of ergative inflection, as is found in Traditional Dyirbal, in favour of a style of inflection more similar to the one found in English.