The Anangu Language

I spent some time in the Northern Territory of Australia, specifically the Ayer’s Rock/Uluru area. This land is traditionally and currently owned by the Anangu people, whom it is believed have inhabited the area for over forty thousand years! That’s almost four times longer than when indigenous people of the Americas first arrived from Siberia. Like many Aboriginal tribes, the Anangu are considered among the oldest continuous human cultures on the planet, and while they no longer exist as nomadic hunter-gatherers as they once did, to this day their culture and language are very much alive.

For decades the land was a national park by the name of Ayer’s Rock (Uluru is the traditional name for the mountain that is held sacred to the Anangu). Naturally, the Anangu people wanted the land back, for the mountains and the land itself is highly important to their culture, religion, and way of life. Because the land was now a national park and an icon of Australian national identity, the Australian government didn’t view as Anangu land, but everybody’s land, open to the public.

Eventually the two parties came to an agreement. In the 1980s, the Australian government returned the land to the Anangu, and the Anangu have signed a 99 year lease with the Australian government to keep the park open. In that spirit, everyone can come to the Uluru area and enjoy a scenery unlike anything else on Earth.

While I was at Uluru I met some of the Anangu people, and I paid attention to the language that they spoke. Their language is apparently a dialect of the Western Desert languages known as Pitjantijatjara. Interestingly, most of the Western Desert languages are largely mutually intelligible, almost like different dialects of a common language; for example the Pitjantijatjara language shares almost 80 percent of its vocabulary with the Yankunytjatjara language of South Australia. Many of the signs around the Anangu cultural center at Uluru were written in both English and Pitjantijatara. Some examples of vocabulary I picked up from these signs are wati, meaning man; minyma, meaning woman; kapi, meaning water; and wiya, meaning no.

The Pitjantijatjara language uses case marking to determine the role a noun plays in a sentence, which is common to many languages. The language also inflects verbs for tense, like English and other European languages, and it has four different classes of verbs that takes different endings. Sentences in Pitjantijatjara use the subject-object-verb order, unlike English which uses the subject-verb-object order.

Here’s an example from Wikipedia:

Minyma-ngku tjitji nya-ngu.

The first word means “woman” in the ergative case (subject of a transitive verb), the second word means “child” in the absolutive case (object of a transitive verb, in this context), and the third word means “see” in the past tense. This sentence translates to “The woman saw the child.”

However, when an intransitive verb is used, the subject of the sentence takes the absolutive case. For example:

Tjitiji a-nu.

The first word, as in the first example, means “child” in the absolutive case. The second word means “go” in the past tense. The sentence translates to “The child went.” As you can see, even though child is the subject of the sentence, it remains in the absolutive case. This is a common occurrence in languages that have an ergative-absolutive case dynamic.

When the subject of the sentence is a pronoun instead, it takes on the nominative case. For example:

Ngayu-lu tjitji nya-ngu.

The first word means “I” in the nominative case, the second word once again means “child” in the absolutive case, and the third word means “see” in the past tense. This sentence translates to “I saw the child.”

While this post is mostly to bring attention to the ancient language of the Anangu people, it’s worth mentioning that I had a wonderful time out here in central Australia. I was traveling with a tour group and stayed at a resort hotel near the park for a few days – very different from the hostel-hopping lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. The Anangu people are friendly and are willing to share information about their way of life with the tourists, and many of them make their livelihoods selling artwork to travelers. However, as a travel advisory of sorts, they do not like it when tourists climb Uluru, and they also consider it rude to have photographs taken of them without their permission. Keep these things in mind should you decide to go out and see Uluru for yourself.