Though the preferred term in English in Academia for some time was Kala Lagaw Ya,[4] according to Ober, the form was always regarded as "colloquial" by native speakers.

The main body of the Hiámo moved to the Thursday Island group to escape the Kiwai colonisation of Daru some centuries ago.

[citation needed] Bouckaert, Bowern and Atkinson (2018) found that Kalaw Lagaw Ya had the highest number of 'unique' (that is, non-Pama-Nyungan) forms of any Australian language in their sample.

[10] Oral tradition and cultural evidence recorded by Haddon and Laade,[11] backed by archaeological evidence[citation needed] and linguistic evidence, shows that Austronesian trade and settlement in South-West Papua, Torres Strait and Cape York occurred; the languages have significant Austronesian vocabulary content,[citation needed] including items such as the following: Some of the Austronesian content is clearly South-East Papuan Austronesian: The linguistic history of the Torres Strait area is complex, and interaction of well over 2500 years has led to many layers of relationship between the local languages, including many words that are obviously common, such as the following 'trade' words in Torres Strait area languages.

[12] A comparison of the Kalaw Lagaw Ya, Meriam Mìr, Kiwai and Uradhi personal pronouns show similarities and differences in typology.

These typological categories also exist in the Trans-Fly languages; the forms in Kalaw Lagaw Ya are clearly Australian.

Some basic vocabulary, terminology dealing with agriculture, canoes, the weather, the sky and the sea, some abstract nouns, some verbs.

Possibly some grammar in the form of function words, such as waadh (KKY waaza) 'existential emphasis' (i.e. 'it is true that ... '), Proto Oceanic Austronesian *waDa 'existential'.

The non-Australian content appears to be mainly lexicon (including verbs), particularly dealing with the sea, farming, canoe and sky/weather/astrology, with possible some syntactic words.

He presented folk history evidence that a few Austronesian traders (men) settled at Parema (north-east of Daru) and married local [Proto–Trans Fly speaking] women.

Over time, the core structure of the local mothers' language dominated, with retention of the newcomers' Papuo-Austronesian content in the appropriate cultural subsystems.

Kalaw Lagaw Ya is thus a mixed language in that a significant part of its lexicon, phonology and grammar is not Australian in origin.

The interplay of the above within the subsystems of Kalaw Lagaw Ya lexicon, phonology and grammar points more to mixing through shift and borrowing rather than pidginisation and creolisation.

loans are concerned, it is possible that some such came into the language in pre-European contact days, with the Makassans and similar fishermen/traders who visited northern Australia and Torres Strait.

The Southern dialect has certain characteristics that link it closely to the northern dialect, and folk history dealing with the Muralag group and Mua reflects this, in that the ancestors of the Kowrareg (the Hiámo) originally came from Dharu (Daru, to the north east of Torres Strait) — and who had previously settled on Dharu from Yama in Central Torres Strait.

Emotive words are those that equate to a certain extent to diminutives in languages such as Irish, Dutch and German, where specific suffixes are added to show 'diminutive' status (-ín, -je and -chen/-el/-lein respectively).

The main syntactic differences are: In all dialects except Kalau Kawau Ya, the verb negative is the nominalised privative form of the verbal noun.

As this form in itself a noun, its subject and direct object are cast in the genitive: The Kalau Kawau Ya dialect uses the verbal noun privative form as an invariable verb negative: The Kalau Kawau Ya dialect has the tenses and aspects listed in the section on verb morphology.

The Kalaw Lagaw Ya dialect also has a 'last night' tense, where the adverb bungil/bungel (reduced form bel) 'last night' has become a verb postclitic, following the model of the adverb ngùl 'yesterday', which had previously become grammaticalised as a 'recent past' tense marker in all dialects, with reduction to -ngu in Kalau Kawau Ya.

burum 'pig', stem: buruma-, plural burumal lag, KLY laaga 'place, home, home island', stem: laga-, plural lagal, KulY lagalai The main differences between the dialects are to do with vocabulary, as can be seen in the following examples: Kala Lagaw Ya is the only Australian language to have the alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/.

In general, there does not to appear to have been any great phonological difference between OKY and the modern dialects of Kalau Lagau Ya (apart from the retention of ř).

One change that occurred much more than in the modern dialects was that of ai monophthongisation to e. The resulting e then often raised to i in open unstressed syllables.

The loss of this sound in the other dialects (and in modern KY) occurred in the following rules; the changes were beginning to be evident already in OKY: Ř between like vowels or in [ə]__V deletes.

This spelling system was based on that used for the Drehu (Lifu) language, though later with the change to Polynesian mission staff, as well as the growing number of indigenous Torres Strait missionaries, the overtly Drehu forms tr, dr and ë were lost; these had no phonological basis in Kalaw Lagaw Ya.

Some writers of the Mabuiag-Badhu dialect (Kalaw Lagaw Ya), for example, write mainly in the Mission system, sometimes use the digraphs oe, th, dh (variant dth) and sometimes use capital letters at the ends of words to show devoiced vowels, such as ngukI 'fresh water/drinking water, fruit juice' /ŋʊːki̥/.

A dictionary now in preparation (Mitchell/Ober) uses an orthography based on detailed study of the surface and underlying phonology of the language, as well as on observation of how people write in real life situations.

It is a mix of the Mission and Kalau Kawau Ya orthographies with the addition of diacritics (the letters in brackets) to aid correct pronunciation, since many of the people who will use this dictionary will not be speakers of the language: a (á), b, d, dh, e (é), g, i (í), k, l, m, n, ng, o (ó, ò, òò), œ (œ'), r, s, t, th, u (ú, ù), w, y, z Within this orthography, w and y are treated as consonants — this is their phonological status in the language — while u and i are used as the glides where phonological considerations show that the 'diphthong' combination has vocalic status.

Note that the third person pronouns are also used as definite articles, e.g. Nuidh garkœzin nan yipkaz imadhin 'The man saw the woman'.

Brierly (B), MacGillivray (M) and Ray (R) recorded the following forms of the singular pronouns of OKY: Based on the above forms and the modern dialects, the OKY pronouns are reconstructed as follows: The accusatives, the ablatives and imitatives underwent optional final vowel deletion, while the ergatives optionally transformed the final u to a or œ, or deleted it, thus ngathu > ngatha > ngathœ > ngath.

There are three aspects ('perfective', 'imperfective', 'habitual'), two telicity forms ('active', which focuses on the verb activity and subsumes many intransitives, many antipassives and some transitives, and 'attainative', which subsumes many transitives, some antipassives and some intransitives), two moods ('non-imperative' and 'imperative' [which resembles a subjunctive in some uses]), 6 tenses ('remote future', 'today/near future', 'present', 'today past', 'recent past', 'remote past' — KLY has developed a 7th tense, a 'last night' tense) and four numbers ('singular', 'dual', 'specific plural', 'animate active plural' — in form the animate active plural is the same as the singular, and is only found on certain verbs).