Juwaliny: Dialectal Variation and Ethnolinguistic Identity in the Great Sandy Desert

Juwaliny is described as the western dialect of Walmajarri, which is the western-most language in the Ngumpin-Yapa language family. Its speakers, the Juwaliny people, left the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia in several stages from the 1940s to 1960s, and settled in various Kimberley communities (Hudson & Yu 1988). The highest concentration of Juwaliny speakers came to live in La Grange Mission, now called Bidyadanga Community, where they were the second largest group in that multicultural community throughout the early years of the mission in the 1970s (McKelson 1976). Today, there are only a handful of full speakers remaining.

In their extensive work on Walmajarri, Joyce Hudson and Eirlys Richards also researched Juwaliny, presenting known variations in the lexicon in the Walmajarri Dictionary published in 1990 (also see Hudson 1978). In the same period Fr K McKelson worked on Juwaliny to produce various recordings, and unpublished wordlists, field notes and liturgical materials for the La Grange Mission. Wangka Maya PALC first started working on Juwaliny in response to requests from the speaker community in Bidyadanga for a dictionary and other resources. Despite the fact that the Walmajarri Dictionary (Richards & Hudson 1990) does include many Juwaliny headwords, the speakers specifically wanted Juwaliny-focussed resources. Thus it was necessary to examine in more detail how it differed from Walmajarri.

This project prompted an interesting research question: What are the types of structural and lexical differences possible between closely related speech varieties; and how is the degree of lexical/structural difference mirrored by differences in ethnolinguistic identity? Both aspects of this question needed to be addressed in order to produce accurate materials for use in the community.