Research Paper On Wangkajunga

Wangkajunga is a member of a large Pama-Nyungan family that belongs to the northwestern Wati Subgroup of the Western Desert language in Australia.
Pama-Nyungan family was identified coined by O’Grady, Wurm and Hale along with a non-Pama-Nyungan family (Blake 1987). Wati Subgroup includes neighboring to and closely related to Wangkajunga Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja languages (Capell 1962; O’Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin 1996; Wurm 1972; Oates and Oates 1970).
O’Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin (1996:138) referred to the Western Desert language as a family-like language that stretches across a vast territory: the language extends from southeast to northwest for a distance of 900 miles. Given this broad territory where Western Desert is
This clitic system is not the only property that distinguishes the northwestern languages of Wangkajunga, Kartujarra, Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja from the southwestern languages. Jones (2011:12) has pointed out that an extremely free word order, minor role of nominalisations in the formation of subordinate clauses, the cross-referencing pronouns compulsory for all participants, and some other features of the northern Western Desert Australian languages set them apart from those in the
Kenneth L. Hale’s work (1976) on the classification of Native Australian languages demonstrates that the Pama-Nyungan languages show shared suppletion of the Ergative (-lu ̴ ngku) and the Locative (-la ̴ ngka) suffixes. However, as described in the Jones’ ‘Grammar of Wangkajunga’(2011), Ergative case in this language has –lu,-ju, and –tu allomorphs and Locative case has –ngka,-ta, and –ja allomorphs. Despite this discrepancy on suppletion, Wangkajunga does belong to the Pama-Nyungan family on the basis of it being a suffixing language, which lack grammatical gender.
Another difference between Wangkajunga and the languages of southern Western Desert is that it does not have a different case marking for proper nouns and independent pronouns and marks both with an Ergative case suffix –lu, unlike its southern neighbors.
When working on her Grammar of Wangkajunga Jones (2011) found out that speakers of Wangkajunga, Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja refer to themselves as speakers of one language and use names of the languages interchangeably. Indeed, thanks to his field work on Wangajunga grammar researcher adduces a grammatical evidence for the fact that Wangkajunga is a name to cover more than one