[2] Alternative names for the language include Warrangu, Warrango, War(r)uŋu, War-oong-oo,[6] Gudjala and Gudjal.
[2] The Warungu language region includes areas from the Upper Herbert River to Mount Garnet.
In the late 1990s or early 2000s a language revival movement started by a community of people, most of them grandchildren of the last speakers, the central figure being Rachel Cummins, the granddaughter of Alf Palmer.
[9][10] The community had contacted Tsunoda, the linguist who worked with the last speakers in the 1970s, and between 2002 and 2006 he conducted 5 sessions of lessons, of 4–5 days each.
[19] The factors involved are the place of articulation (the more front the stop, the more likely it is to be voiced), the phonetic environment, position with respect to word boundaries, and possibly also the length of the word, the number of syllables that follow the stop and the location of stress.
The allophony of /i/ seems to be governed by more complex rules but generally, [i] is the sole allophone after /ɟ/ˌ /ɲ/ˌ /ŋ/ and /w/, while after almost all other consonants both [i] and [e] can be observed.
Warrongo is analysed as having five word classes: nouns, (personal) pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections.
[21] Adjectives do not form a separate class as they share the morphology and syntactic behaviour of nouns.
[22] There are also about a dozen enclitics, with a range of functions: emphasis, focus, intensification, or meanings like 'only', 'enough', 'too', 'I don't know', 'counterfactual'.
The case suffixes have allomorphs according to the final phoneme of the stem, with some peculiarities exhibited by pronouns and by vowel-final proper and kin nouns .
In pronouns, on the other hand, the nominative and the ergative coincide in the bare stem form, while the accusative is marked by a suffix.
Exceptionally, the third person dual and plural pronouns, as well as vowel-final proper and kin nouns, receive separate marking for each of these three cases.
The dative case marks purpose, cause and reason, possession (rarely), goal and direction of movement, recipient, temporal duration or endpoint, a core argument in some syntactic constructions, and a complement of intransitives verbs or nouns like 'fond (of)', 'good (to)', 'know', 'forget'.
[42] The agent-like argument then becomes available to be coreferential with a patient of a transitive verb or a subject of an intransitive one: gorngga-dohusband-ERGbirgowife.ABSmayga-ntell-NFwajo-gali-yal[43]cook-ANTIP-PURPgorngga-do birgo mayga-n wajo-gali-yal[43]husband-ERG wife.ABS tell-NF cook-ANTIP-PURP"[The] husband told [his] wife to cook."