Marra, sometimes formerly spelt Mara, is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper, Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers.
[3] The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Borroloola and Minyerri.
Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction.
[5] The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia): burdal, murrungun, and mambali.
[6] Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names mambali, murrungun, wurdal, and guyal (wuyal).
[7] In the years 1973–1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary.
With the interdentals excepted, the Marra consonants consist of a stop and a nasal in each of five places of articulation with two laterals, two rhotics, and two semivowels.
The only permitted word-initial consonant clusters are homorganic (involving the same place of articulation) nasal + stop combinations, particularly mb or ngg.
Word-final consonant clusters can only take the form liquid (lateral or rhotic) plus noncoronal (labial, laminoalveolar, or velar) stop or nasal.
In segments that are repeated in a word – either by reduplication or by chance morphology – the second stop is often lenited into a semivowel or lost altogether.
This lenition can optionally occur at the beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel.
Personal and demonstrative pronouns, however, each form a distinctive word class, and all can be clearly distinguished from verb complexes.
The neuter case is reserved for body parts, topographic terms, abstract conceptions, and the word gurnarru, "sun".
Unlike other nouns, pronouns do not show a nominative/ergative distinction but instead use the nominative form to mark all subjects as well as the direct object of a transitive verb.
They are generally formed by the prefixes ni- MSG, ngi- FSG, n-gi- NEUT, wirr- or warra- DU, and wil- or wila- PL for the nominative or na- MSG, ya- FSG, nya- NEUT, wirri- DU, and wili- PL for the non-nominative and the suffixes -nya (non-predicative proximate), -n-garra (predicative proximate), -ya (unlocalized immediate), -yarra (localized immediate), -nanya or -ninya (distant), and -nangga or -ningga (anaphoric), though there are irregular forms for some combinations.
Like many of the languages of Arnhem Land, Marra's cardinal directions correspond closely with English "north, south, east, west", but have intricate case morphology.
that display a similar morphological complexity: Yes–no questions in Marra are identical to assertions, with a slight intonation difference.
"), though the local English-based creole's question marker ngi occasionally appears in modern Marra speech.
If the distinction between interrogative and indefinite is unclear from context, the adverb jabay "maybe" can be added to indicate that the phrase is an assertion and not a question.
A basic verb complex in Marra consists of a pronominal prefix, an inflectable verb-stem, and suffixes marking tense, aspect, and mood.
Note that the evitative is normally paired with another clause (as Heath says, it “does not normally stand alone as a simple prediction of impending doom”), usually in the imperative.
As in Warndarrang and other related languages, a different pronominal prefix is added to the verb for each combination of subject and object.
If, however, the clause can be reduced to a single verb complex, that word is typically nominalized using the suffixes –manjarr or –manggirri and then placed following the head noun.
Marra does not have the complex avoidance speech or male-female language distinction that is found in neighboring Yanyula.
The three documented languages share much vocabulary and have many similar grammatical structures, though there are significant differences, and Warndarrang has been heavily influenced by loanwords from Nunggubuyu and Ngandi to the north.
[10] The Marran languages also share verbal features such as particle reduplication within the verbal complex indicating a repeated or continuous action (a pattern common in Australian languages), and the negation of verbs is indicated by a particle immediately preceding the verb complex (gu in both Warndarang and Marra but ngayi in Alawa).
All three languages distinguish between singular, dual, and plural, with Warndarrang having an additional "paucal" (three to five) class for human nouns.
Marra has an extremely complex kinship terminology system, including a large number of dyadic terms;[5] Warndarrang’s system appeared to be much simpler, though the linguist Jeffrey Heath was unable to elicit much kinship information before his informant died.
[7] Alawa has a morphologically-irregular system similar to Marra's, but lacks the dyadic terms and shares few cognates (exceptions include baba for "older sibling").
The semi-moieties in Warndarrang and Marra have nearly identical names, however, though the groups were associated with different totems, songs, and rituals.