It is a primarily prefixing language with agglutinating verbal complexes and relatively straightforward syntax.
Warndarrang is closely related to Mara, which was traditionally spoken to the south of Warndarang and today has a handful of speakers.
A Warndarang story of the Hodgson Downs massacre is published separately, and both Margaret Sharpe and Arthur Capell collected material in the 1960s and 1940s, respectively, much of which is unpublished but was incorporated into Heath's grammar.
[2] Warndarang is an extinct language — the last speaker died in 1974 — but was traditionally spoken along the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia) near the mouths of the Roper, Phelp, and Rose Rivers.
[2] The Warndarang people classified themselves into four patrilineal semimoieties used in ritual settings: mambali, muruŋun, wuʈal, and guyal (wuyal).
Isaac was born in approximately 1904 in the Phelp River region, moving as a young man to work as a stockman with the Mara people.
As such, he had spoken very little Warndarang in decades preceding Heath's arrival, speaking instead in Mara, English, Kriol, or Nunggubuyu, but proved to be a good informant, especially knowledgeable on flora-fauna and religiously significant terms.
An elderly woman by the name of Elizabeth Joshua remembered a small amount of Warndarang, and Heath checked a few points with her after Isaac's death.
Word- or stem-final clusters in Warndarang are formed by the combination of a lateral, rhotic, or semi-vowel (l, ɭ, r, ɻ, y, or w) and a velar or lamino-alveolar stop or nasal (g, ŋ, j, or ɲ).
Geminate clusters (in which the same consonant is repeated twice) are found only in reduplicated words such as garaggarag, "darter (Anhinga novaehollandiae)."
A small number of reduplicated words display other consonant combinations, as in guralgguralg "common koel (Eudynamys orientalis)".
Heath was not able to acquire enough data to determine a rule for /i/ + /a/ or /i/ + /u/, and only the underlying triple-vowel sequence /uai/, which becomes an /i/, was observed out of all possible three-vowel combinations.
The interdental stop d̪, however, which occurs primarily in loans from Nunggubuyu, is fortis and voiceless no matter its position.
In nouns and adjectives, reduplication often but not always takes the meaning of plurality, often with humans, as in wulu-muna-munaɳa-ɲu "white people" or wu-ɭuɭga-ɭuɭga "islands."
In addition to the classifiers and articles marking the singular/dual/paucal/plural distinction, Warndarang can also indicate the number of an object with quantifiers that precede the noun.
Possessive pronouns mark for person, number, and inclusivity, but not for gender or for non-human noun class.
The suffix –wala, usually considered to be the ablative marker, can be added to a demonstrative to mean that the noun is moving toward the center of the frame of reference, an affix also found in the languages Ngandi and Nunggubuyu to the north.
Likewise, the locative marker –yaŋa, when added to a demonstrative, takes the meaning of motion in any direction except that towards the center of the frame of reference.
After this slot comes the rare prefix –man-, whose meaning Heath was unable to determine but appears to indicate the speaker's involvement in the verbal complex.
To ask a yes/no question in Warndarang, an assertion is stated with a slight intonational difference (rise on the penultimate syllable, fall on the ultimate syllable, as opposed to a level tone falling off), though jabay "maybe" can be added to the end of the statement to underscore the questioning nature.
To focus (emphasize) a component of a Warndarang sentence, the constituent is brought to the beginning of the clause, separated from the remaining words with the particle wu-nu.
Nominalization, the transformation of a verb or member of another non-nominal syntactic class into a noun, is rare in Warndarang, with just a few, unproductive examples in the text.
Heath was unable to elicit or find any conditional constructions ("if X, then Y") during his study; the closest examples in the text use the word jabay "maybe" ("Maybe he will come, maybe I will kill him") or place both clauses within the past potential.
"3) Wu-nɲaya, wiya ara-ŋama-ŋama ɻa-yaraman-gu wu-nɲya-wala wu-nu ʈuɳg-iŋa ʈuʈul wu-niɲi Roper Valley.
The three documented languages share much vocabulary and have many similar grammatical structures, though there are significant differences, and Warndarang has been heavily influenced by loanwords from Nunggubuyu and Ngandi to the north.
[10] The Maran 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 Mara but ŋayi in Alawa).
All three languages distinguish between singular, dual, and plural, with Warndarang having an additional "paucal" (three to five) class for human nouns.
Mara has an extremely complex kinship terminology system, including a large number of dyadic terms;[11] Warndarang's system appeared to be much simpler, though the linguist Jeffrey Heath was unable to elicit much kinship information before his informant died.
[3] Alawa has a morphologically irregular system similar to Mara's, but lacks the dyadic terms and shares few cognates (exceptions include baba for "older sibling").
The semi-moieties in Warndarang and Mara have nearly identical names, however, though the groups were associated with different totems, songs, and rituals.