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Dyirbal ( ;Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were eight speakers of the language in 2016 and 24 speakers in 2021. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among linguistics.
In the years since the Dyirbal grammar by Robert Dixon was published in 1972, Dyirbal has steadily moved closer to language death as younger community members have failed to learn it.
The speakers of these dialects largely regard their dialects as different languages. They were classified as dialects by researcher Robert Dixon, who classified them as such based on linguistic criteria and their similarities, some dialects sharing as much as 90% of their vocabularies. Since the dialects were viewed by speakers as different languages, the language had no formal name, so Dixon assigned the language the name Dyirbal, naming it after Jirrbal, which was the dialect with the largest number of speakers at the time he was studying it.
The class usually labelled "feminine" (II) inspired the title of George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Some Linguistics distinguish between such systems of classification and the gendered division of items into the categories of "feminine", "masculine" and (sometimes) "neuter" that is found in, for example, many Indo-European languages.
Dyirbal shows a split ergativity system. Sentences with a first or second person pronoun have their marked for case in a pattern that mimics nominative–accusative languages. That is, the first or second person pronoun appears in the least marked case when it is the subject (regardless of the transitivity of the verb), and in the most marked case when it is the direct object. Thus Dyirbal is morphologically accusative in the first and second persons, but morphologically ergative elsewhere; and it is still always syntax ergative.
Furthermore, because marriage typically took place a generation above or below, the cross-cousin of the opposite sex often is a potential mother-in-law or father-in-law. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the standard language except for four lexical items referring to grandparents on the mother and father's side.
The taboo relationship was reciprocal. Thus, an individual was not allowed to speak with one's own mother-in-law and it was equally taboo for the mother-in-law to speak to her son-in-law. This relationship also prevailed among both genders such that a daughter-in-law was forbidden to speak to directly or approach her father-in-law and vice versa. This taboo existed, but less strongly enforced, between members of the same sex such that a male individual ought to have used the respectful style of speech in the presence of his father-in-law, but the father-in-law could decide whether or not to use the everyday style of speech or the respectful style in the presence of his son-in-law.
The specialized and complex form of the language, the Dyalŋuy, was used in the presence of the taboo relatives whereas a form referred to in most dialects as Guwal was used in all other circumstances. The Dyalŋuy had one quarter of the amount of lexical items as the everyday language which reduced the semantic content in actual communication in the presence of a taboo relative. For example, in Dyalŋuy the verb 'to ask' is baŋarrmba-l. In Guwal, 'to ask' is ŋanba-l, 'to invite someone over' is yumba-l, 'to invite someone to accompany one' is bunma-l and 'to keep asking after having already been told' is gunji-y. There are no correspondences to the other three verbs of Guwal in Dyalŋuy.
To get around this limitation, Dyirbal speakers use many syntactic and semantic tricks to make do with a minimal vocabulary which reveals a lot to linguists about the semantic nature of Dyirbal. For example, Guwal makes use of lexical , such as bana- and gaynyja- . This is similar to English "He broke the glass" (transitive) vs. "The glass broke." (intransitive). Since Dyirbal has fewer lexemes, a morpheme -rri- is used as an intransitive derivational suffix. Thus the Dyalŋuy equivalents of the two words above were transitive yuwa and intransitive yuwa-rri-.
The lexical items found in Dyalŋuy were mainly derived from three sources: "borrowings from the everyday register of neighbouring dialects or languages, the creation of new Dyalŋuy forms by phonological deformation of lexemes from the language's own everyday style, and the borrowing of terms that were already in the Dyalŋuy style of a neighboring language or dialect".
An example of borrowing between dialects is the word for sun in the Yidin and Ngadyan dialects. In Yidin, the Guwal style word for sun is buŋan, and this same word was also the Dyalŋuy style of the word for sun in the Ngadyan dialect. It is hypothesized that children of Dyirbal tribes were expected to acquire the Dyalŋuy speech style years following their acquisition of the everyday speech style from their cross cousins who would speak in Dyalŋuy in their presence. By the onset of puberty, the child probably spoke Dyalŋuy fluently and was able to use it in the appropriate contexts. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930, when the taboo system fell out of use.
Young Dyirbal is grammatically distinct from Traditional Dyirbal, in some cases being more similar to English, such as the gradual loss of ergative inflection, as is found in Traditional Dyirbal, in favour of a style of inflection more similar to the one found in English.
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