It is mostly spoken at Kalkaringi and Daguragu which are Aboriginal communities located on the traditional lands of the Gurindji.
Related mixed varieties are spoken to the north by Ngarinyman and Bilinarra people at Yarralin and Pigeon Hole.
The maintenance of Gurindji within the mixed language can be seen as the perpetuation of Aboriginal identity under massive and continuing cultural incursion.
From 1855 onwards, the traditional lands of the Gurindji and neighbouring groups were seized by colonists who were searching for good cattle pastures.
In 1966, the Gurindji initiated a workers' strike to protest against their poor conditions of employment and ultimately regain control of their traditional lands.
Their campaign was called the Wave Hill Walk-off and went on for nine years, resulting in the first successful land claim by an Aboriginal group in Australia.
Today the Gurindji continue to live on their traditional lands in two main communities - Kalkaringi and Daguragu.
Before colonisation the Gurindji were multilingual, speaking the languages of neighbouring groups with whom they had familiar and ceremonial connections.
At this time, similar changes to local linguistic ecologies occurred in other places in northern Australia with Kriol becoming the dominant language in many areas such as Timber Creek and Katherine.
[6] Felicity Meakins[7][8] argues that maintenance of Gurindji elements in the mixed language relates closely to the land rights movement and can be considered an expression of the persistence of their ancestral identity.
Additionally McConvell[9] suggests that the homogeneity of the linguistic situation (one traditional language spoken at Kalkaringi) may have also aided the maintenance of Gurindji.
Standard Australian English is the language of government services and the school, though its use is generally restricted to these domains.
In general, based on a 200 word Swadesh list, 36.6% of vocabulary is derived from Kriol and 35% finds its origins in Gurindji.
The remaining 28.4% are synonymous forms from both languages, where the choice of word depends on a number of factors including the interlocutors.
Words of Gurindji origin contain a three-way coronal contrast for stops, nasals and laterals, and a distinction between a post-alveolar rhotic and an apical trill (sometimes pronounced as a tap).
Even in the more acrolectal forms of Kriol words, final consonant clusters are never present at the surface level.
For example, in Kriol words, the plosive series is occasionally hypercorrected to fricatives of a similar place of articulation.
The Gurindji Kriol noun phrase consists of a head plus a number of potential modifiers.
The order of noun phrase constituents is relatively fixed: DET - MOD - HEAD.
"[14]green words are Gurindji-derived, and purple words are Kriol-derivedGurindji Kriol distinguishes between past (bin) and present tense (zero-marked for nouns, -m for pronouns) and marks future time using a potential marker (garra) which is also used to express obligation.
[15] wartarraheyyu2SGbinPSTkirtbreakdatthengakparn-kufrog-DAThawujhousewartarra yu bin kirt dat ngakparn-ku hawujhey 2SG PST break the frog-DAT house"Hey you broke the frog's home (the bottle).
manmani3SG.SBJbinPSTgetgetbaitbitewarlaku-nginyidog-ABLwartan-tahand-LOCman i bin get bait warlaku-nginyi wartan-taman 3SG.SBJ PST get bite dog-ABL hand-LOC"The man got bitten by a dog on the hand.