[4] Because of its role as the lingua franca in the region, Murrinh-patha is one of the few Australian Aboriginal languages whose number of speakers has increased and whose usage has expanded over the past generation.
Aboriginal people who have recently married into Wadeye generally take a few years to acquire the new language.
[7] Murrinh-Patha is also the main language of Palumpa, located 50 km away from Wadeye and not in traditionally Murrinh-Patha-speaking territory.
[10] Nonetheless, other than having cognates in their finite-verb morphology and in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi),[11] they have little vocabulary in common, though their grammatical structures are very similar.
Similarly, although differing in vocabulary, Murrinh-Patha and the moribund Marringarr language share syntax structure.
[16] The community orthography represents dentals and palatals the same way because they were historically in largely complementary distribution.
There are, however, many exceptions to that rule in the case of plosives, including many borrowings and the non-borrowed noun classifier /cu/, used for fighting and weapons.
On the other hand, in the case of nasals, the only word breaking this distributional rule identified by Mansfield is /pren ɲu/ 'brand new'.
[18] The sequencing of morphemes in the verb is highly structured, but the ordering of words in a sentence is largely free.
Nouns are divided into ten classes or genders along roughly semantic lines, with some exceptions.
The Dictionary: English/Murrinh-Patha / compiled by Chester S Street with the assistance of Gregory Panpawa Mollingin (1983) is available online.