[4] Laurie, unable to speak English, was able to express her desire to save her language when she met Bentley on Murruŋga Island.
[5] The work has also initiated a family of projects aimed at sustaining the linguistic, cultural and biological diversity of the Crocodile Islands.
These include the Yan-nhangu Ecological Knowledge (YEK) and bilingual resources database for schools, CII Cultural mapping project, Crocodile Islands Rangers[6] and junior rangers programs, an ethnographic description of Yan-nhangu marine identity, learner's guide, and an online dictionary project.
[7] Yan-nhaŋu is a Yolŋu Matha (people's tongue) language belonging to the traditional owners of the seas and Islands of the Crocodile Group.
[8][9][10][11] The majority of Yan-nhaŋu speakers reside in and around Maningrida and Milingimbi communities, and surrounding outstations such as Murruŋga.
The Yan-nhaŋu speaking Yolŋu people are the traditional owners of the land and sea of the Castlereagh Bay area.
Yan-nhangu people own an area of the Arafura sea and thirty one islands of just under 10,000 square kilometres (3,900 sq mi).
Sometime after 1600 the annual arrival of Maccassan sailors harvesting trepang (bech de mer) changed the timings and patterns of Yan-nhangu people's seasonal movements around the Crocodile Islands.
The arrival of the Methodist mission to the island of Milingimbi in 1922 attracted large numbers of eastern of kin to settle permanently on the Yan-nhaŋu estate.
The Yan-nhaŋu are a Yolŋu people with a distinctly marine orientation arising from intimate coexistence with their salt water country.
Yan-nhangu estates, religious identities and languages are ancestral endowments that form linkages of connection and difference throughout the networks of Yolngu society.
Yan-nhangu clan identities, estates, language and ritual resources are passed down through patrilineal descent.
Yan-nhangu people continue to perform the rich ritual, musical, dance and artistic practices shared by Yolngu kin throughout north-east Arnhem Land.
Yirritja Yan-nhangu speakers belong to the Bindarra, Ngurruwulu and Walamangu patri-groups of the Crocodile Islands.
In Yan-nhaŋu, nominals (nouns and pronouns) often take case suffixes to denote their grammatical role in a sentence.
Added to a sentence before a verb in the primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary form, they provide additional information about tense or mood.
The ergative suffix is also used as an instrumental marker to show that a noun is being used by the sentence subject to carry out the transitive action.
The following table is a classification scheme of Yan-nhaŋu verbs and their conjugations in the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary forms.
Conversely, nouns may be transformed into verbs by the addition of one of the allomorphs –tjirri, -yirri, or –djirri, ‘become,’ or –kuma, -guma, or –yuma, ‘make.’ wapthana‘jump’→ wapthananara‘jumping'wapthana → wapthananara‘jump’ {} ‘jumping'bamparra‘stand’→ bamparranhara‘standing’bamparra → bamparranhara‘stand’ {} ‘standing’yindi‘big’→ yindiyuma‘to make big’yindi → yindiyuma‘big’ {} {‘to make big’}buḻaŋgitj‘good’→ buḻaŋgitjkuma‘to make good’buḻaŋgitj → buḻaŋgitjkuma‘good’ {} {‘to make good’}bambay‘blind’→ bambayyirri‘to become blind’bambay → bambayyirri‘blind’ {} {‘to become blind’}borum‘ripe’→ borumdjirri‘to ripen’borum → borumdjirri‘ripe’ {} {‘to ripen’}Reduplication of some Yan-nhaŋu verbs can be used to express intensification or the habitual or repeated nature of the action, a common feature of indigenous Australian languages.