Ingrid speaking Wajuk (Nyoongar)

Ingrid speaks Australian English and Nyungar, one of 300+ languages spoken by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait islanders. It is spoken in southwestern Australia by the Noongar people. This video was recorded by Cameron Willis and Kristen Tcherneshoff in Stockholm, Sweden. Nyungar, or Noongar, is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is spoken by the Noongar community in the southwest corner of Western Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics census data recorded 232 speakers as of 2006, an increase since 1996; however, the rigor of the Bureau’s data collection methods has been challenged, and the number of speakers may in fact be considerably higher. Prior to European contact, Nyungar referred not to a single language but to a subgroup of individual dialects, which today have merged into what is now considered modern Nyunga. Some of these are disputed to have actually been distinct but closely related languages; in fact, a 1990 conference by the Nyoongar Language Project Advisory Panel recognized at least three distinct languages within this subgroup. Like most Pama-Nyungan languages, Nyungar is agglutinative. Word order is free but tends to follow a subject-object-verb pattern. Nyungar also has a complex tense and aspect system, something it shares with most Australian languages. Grammar, syntax, and orthography vary significantly from region to region, as there are several varieties of Nyungar. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in the Nyungar language: the Noongar Language and Culture Centre now has offices in Bunbury, Northam, and Perth, and by 2010, educators Glenys Collard and Rose Whitehurst had 37 schools in the South West and Perth teaching Nyungar. Ingrid, the speaker in this video, is currently working on a bilingual Nyungar Wikipedia, and hopes to have it approved by Wikimedia soon. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org. Help us caption & translate this video! https://amara.org/v/C1qdr/