Yanyuwa

Yanyuwa is spoken by approximately 150 speakers in the Northern Territories of Australia. It is a good example of one of many Australian languages that make heavy use of articulations in the dental, alveolar and retroflex regions.

For example, it shows the typical pattern that when a language has both dental and alveolar articulations, the dental tends to be laminal, and the alveolar tends to be apical (see Temne for an exception to this).

In addition it has apical postalveolar (retroflex) and laminal postalveolar (palatoalveolar) articulations.

As a further quite unusual addition it has two places of articulation in the velar region which might be referred to as "front velar" and "back velar". As pointed out by L&M, the front velar articulation is certainly not as far forward as the palatal articulation in Hungarian, nor is the back velar articulation as far back as the uvular articulation found various languages (e.g Quechua).

Click here to go to the original SoWL Demo