[2] It was once assumed to be a member of the adjacent Gunwinyguan family that stretches from Arnhem Land, throughout Kakadu National Park and south to Katherine,[7] but this has since been rejected.

[7] Stephen Wilson additionally notes some other similarities, such as in the pronominal prefixes and the marking of non-case-marked nominals.

[9] Mark Harvey notes similarities in the verbal inflectional systems between Wagiman and the neighbouring Eastern Daly languages.

[11] The land is highly fertile and well-watered, and contains a number of cattle stations, on which many members of the ethnic group used to work.

[3] Apart from Mayali, Kriol, a creole language based on the vocabulary of English, is the lingua franca of the area.

[5] The Wagiman people are also partial speakers of a number of other languages, including Jaminjung, Wardaman and Dagoman.

The verb ra-ndi 'throw', for instance, surfaces as la-ndi when inflected for third-person singular subjects (he/she/it), which are realised by invisible, or null morphemes.

In English and most other Indo-European languages with the exception of Russian, this movement occurs regularly, such that the prefix in-, for example, changes to im- when it precedes either a p, a b or an m. Wagiman does not do this.

A nasal in a coda retains its position regardless of the following consonant: If Wagiman constrained against heterorganic clusters and assimilated them for place, as English does, these words would surface as [maŋŋaɖaɫ], [bɪŋɡan], and [ŋambʊnɪ].

Wagiman nominals take case suffixes (see below) that denote their grammatical or semantic role in the sentence.

Demonstratives are similarly considered nominals in Wagiman, and take the same case suffixes depending on their semantic and syntactic roles; their function within the sentence.

The 3rd person singular and plural nominative forms, ngonggega and bogo, are labeled 'rare' because they are gradually becoming disused.

Moreover, since the person and number of the subject is contained in the prefix of the verb, nominative free pronouns are often dropped.

'The nominative pronoun root in this instance, ngagun 'I', takes the ergative case suffix -yi to denote the fact that it is the agent of a transitive clause.

The fact that the genitive forms have regular endings across the entire pronoun paradigm may have been a historical accident.

Wagiman verbs obligatorily inflect for person and number of core arguments, and for the tense and aspect of the clause.

If they are to act as the head of a clause, they must combine with a verb, thereby forming a bipartite verbal compound, commonly called a complex predicate.

Wagiman, along with other Gunwinyguan languages, inflects verbs for person and number of the subject obligatorily, and optionally for the object.

Wagiman is a morphologically rich language and each part of speech has its own set of associated bound morphemes, some of which are obligatory, while others are optional.

While only a small number of tense and aspect affixes exist, the interplay between those in the verbal prefix and in the suffix, can generate more highly specified temporal and aspectual clauses.

They encode three variables: person, number and tense, and are only segmentable in a few cases; one prefix cannot be separated into the three parts.

There are a number of case suffixes, denoting ergative, absolutive, dative, allative, locative, ablative, semblative, temporal, instrumental and so on.

'There are also some bound particles, which appear to function in much the same syntactic manner as cases, but which are not considered 'case', for theoretical reasons.

Coverbs also have their own set of inflectional morphemes, such as aspect, but may also take semantic case suffixes (all those listed above except for ergative and absolutive).

The morpheme that is glossed as aspect in the above example, referred to in the literature as the -ma suffix, denotes aspectual unmarkedness.

Further to derivational and inflectional morphemes, Wagiman coverbs and nominals often undergo reduplication, whereby a part, or often the entirety of the root, is repeated.

A complex predicate is the combination of more than one element, more than one individual word, to convey the information involved in a single event.

[17] For instance, the event swim is conveyed in Wagiman using a combination of a verb ya- 'go' and a coverb liri-ma 'swimming'.

Wagiman is differentiated from other Australian languages in that it has a regular and productive process of verbalisation, whereby coverbs can become verbs and act as the independent head of a clause.

[18] Verbalisation involves re-analysing the entire coverb - including its suffix -ma, which serves merely to indicate that it is unmarked for aspect - as a verb root, and then to apply the usual obligatory verbal inflection affixes for person, number and tense.