Evans and colleagues, after studying the mythology of both tribes, speculate that it was the Yangkaal elders who invented Damin and passed it to the Lardil.
[citation needed] According to Fleming (2017), "the eccentric features of Damin developed in an emergent and unplanned manner in which conventionalized paralinguistic phonations became semanticized as they were linked up with a signed language employed by first-order male initiates".
It is sometimes said that Damin was a secret language, but this is misleading since there was no attempt to prevent the uninitiated members of the Leerdil tribe from overhearing it.
Damin lexical words were organised into semantic fields and shouted out to the initiate in a single session.
One speaker did claim to have learned to speak Damin in a single session, but on the other hand two senior warama men admitted that they lacked a firm command of the register.
They spoke the register particularly in ritual contexts, but also in everyday secular life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like.
Damin words had three of Lardil's four pairs of vowels, [a, aː, i, iː, u, uː]; the fourth, [ə, əː], occurred in grammatical suffixes.
[4] Damin used only some of the (pulmonic) consonants of everyday Lardil, but they were augmented by four other airstream mechanisms: lingual ingressive (the nasal clicks), glottalic egressive (a velar ejective), pulmonic ingressive (an indrawn lateral fricative), and lingual egressive (a bilabial 'spurt').
Even some of the pulmonic egressive consonants are exotic for the Australian context: fricatives, voiceless nasals, and bilabial trills.
Damin consonant clusters at the beginning of a word are p'ny [ʘ↑n̠ʲ], p'ng [ʘ↑ŋ], fny [ɸn̠ʲ], fng [ɸŋ], fy [ɸj], prpry [ʙ\ʙj], thrr [t̻ɾ].
It had only two pronouns (n!a "me" (ego) and n!u "not me" (alter)), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and had an antonymic prefix kuri- (jijuu "small", kurijijuu "large").
For example, a sandpiper is called a 'person-burning creature' (ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu 'human burn-NOM animal') in reference to its role as a character in the Rainbow Serpent Story, while a wooden axe is 'wood that (negatively) affects honey' (m!iwu didi-i-n wiijpu 'honey affect-PASS-NOM wood') There is some suggestion of internal morphology or compounding, as suggested by the patterns in the word list above.