page_title: Wagiman language
section_title: Relation with other languages
hierarchical_section_title: Wagiman language / Language and speakers / Relation with other languages
caption_attribution_description: English: The female frilled-neck lizard terminal dreaming site, the place where the female frilled-neck lizard died and became the hill.
context_page_description: Wagiman is a moribund indigenous Australian language currently spoken by 2 elderly Wagiman people in and around Pine Creek, in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory.
  The Wagiman language is notable within linguistics for its complex system of verbal morphology, which remains under-investigated, its possession of a cross-linguistically rare part of speech called a coverb, its complex predicates and for its ability to productively verbalise coverbs. The predicationality of complex predicates in Wagiman is currently investigated by Daniel Krauße in his PhD thesis.
  Wagiman is expected to become extinct within the next generation, as the youngest generation speak no Wagiman and understand very little.
context_section_description: Wagiman is a language isolate within the hypothetical Australian language family. It was once assumed to be a member of the adjacent Gunwinyguan family that stretches from Arnhem Land, throughout Kakadu National Park and south to Katherine, but this has since been rejected. Wagiman may still bear a remote relation with its neighbouring languages but this is yet to be demonstrated.
  Francesca Merlan believes that Wagiman may be distantly related to the Yangmanic languages, citing that they both use verbal particles in a similar way, to the exclusion of neighbouring languages (such as Jawoyn and Mangarrayi). Stephen Wilson additionally notes some other similarities, such as in the pronominal prefixes and the marking of non-case-marked nominals. However both languages have a very low cognacy rate (shared vocabulary) of about 10%. Wagiman is also superficially similar to the neighbouring Gunwinyguan languages phonologically (both share a fortis/lenis stop contrast and a phonemic glottal stop) and to the Mirndi language Jaminjung-Ngaliwurru in the use of coverbs. Mark Harvey notes similarities in the verbal inflectional systems between Wagiman and the neighbouring Eastern Daly languages.
caption: Jaben; the Frilled-Neck Lizard, one of the Wagiman people's sacred sites
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