| Nukunu | |
| Region: | South Australia |
| Ethnicity: | Nukunu |
| Extinct: | ca. 2000 |
| Familycolor: | Australian |
| Fam1: | Pama–Nyungan |
| Fam2: | Thura-Yura |
| Fam3: | (unclassified) |
| Iso3: | nnv |
| Glotto: | nugu1241 |
| Glottorefname: | Nugunu (Australia) |
| Script: | Latin |
| Notice: | IPA |
| Aiatsis: | L4 |
Nukunu (or Nugunu or many other names: see below) is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language spoken by Nukunu people on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. As of 2017, there is a revival and maintenance programme under way for the language.[1]
This language has been known by many names by neighbouring tribes and Australianists, including:
Nukunu is a Pama–Nyungan language, closely related to neighboring languages in the Miru cluster[2] like Narungga, Kaurna, and Ngadjuri.
Nukunu has three different vowels with contrastive long and short lengths (a, i, u, a:, i:, u:).
| Front | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| High | pronounced as /i iː/ | pronounced as /u uː/ | |
| Low | pronounced as /a aː/ | ||
The Nukunu consonantal inventory is typical for a Pama–Nyungan language, with six places of articulation for stops and nasals. There are three rhotics in the language.
| Peripheral | Laminal | Apical | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labial | Velar | Dental | Palatal | Alveolar | Retroflex | |||
| Stop | Voiceless | pronounced as /p/ | pronounced as /k/ | pronounced as /t̪/ | pronounced as /c/ | pronounced as /t/ | pronounced as /ʈ/ | |
| Voiced | pronounced as /(ɖ)/ | |||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /m/ | pronounced as /ŋ/ | pronounced as /n̪/ | pronounced as /ɲ/ | pronounced as /n/ | pronounced as /ɳ/ | ||
| Lateral | pronounced as /l̪/ | pronounced as /ʎ/ | pronounced as /l/ | pronounced as /ɭ/ | ||||
| Tap | pronounced as /ɾ/ | |||||||
| Trill | pronounced as /r/ | |||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /w/ | pronounced as /j/ | pronounced as /ɻ/ | |||||
A phonemic voicing contrast exists in Nukunu, but it has only been observed in the retroflex stop series. An example demonstrating such a contrast intervocalically is kurdi (phlegm, IPA ['kuɖi]) and kurti (quandong, IPA ['kuʈi]).
In contrast with other Thura–Yura languages, Nukunu did not partake in either the initial th- lenition before vowels or the lenition of initial k- before vowels.