Murrinhpatha, a language like no other!

This is Stephen Bunduck, a Kardu Diminin man and generous participant in a series of visioning workshops in Wadeye, always in his big hat.

Here he describes the family and clan groups that make up the community, a complex overlay to our re-imagining of how the built environment might work.

He is speaking Murrinhpatha, a language described as ‘polysynthetic’ and with a ‘free word order’. We’re no linguists, and so we’re not going to begin to try and describe what this means. But we will point you to an article in the Scientific American journal that reveals how fascinating Murrinhpatha is, unique even within the context of Australian Aboriginal languages.

The community resisted the attempts at assimilation imposed by Catholic missionaries. In the article, the researcher asks an Elder, ‘how it was that despite the cruelty of the missions and the punishment by the nuns, her people still spoke Murrinhpatha. “We just used to whisper,” the woman replied.’

Murrinhpatha continues to thrive as a language and is widely spoken in community and given equal attention in school as English. Here’s a link to the journal article if you’d like to learn more; we promise it’s an interesting read!