Alfred speaking Gunggay

From First Languages Australia, Alfred Grey Junior speaks Gunggay, a variety of Yidiny, one of 300+ languages spoken by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Learn more: https://firstlanguages.org.au/. Self-filmed by Alfred Grey-Junior in Australia. He is speaking Gunggay, a variety of Yidiny that has survived despite a recent decrease in usage. In the past few centuries, Anglicization or erasure of many Australian Aboriginal languages occurred, but Yidiny is holding on and being taught and promoted by its linguistic community. In Cairn, the region of Australia where Gunggay originated, there are efforts to catalogue and utilize the language’s vocabulary both at home and in schools. All varieties of Yidiny are agglutinative, meaning that the words are formed in complex combinations of meaningful morphemes. They also follow the uncommon ergative-absolutive alignment, meaning that the subject or core argument of the sentence will align with the object rather than with the agent of the sentence’s verb as we expect to see in most other languages. The speaker(s) featured herein have not explicitly agreed to distribute this video for reuse. For inquiries on licensing this video, please contact hello@wikitongues.org. (edited) Help us caption & translate this video! https://amara.org/v/C1gRt/