The Yan-nhaŋu people derive their ethnonym from the language they spoke, yän meaning 'tongue/speech' and nhaŋu a proximate deictic word signifying 'this'.
In his classic survey of Australian tribes, Norman Tindale assigned their modern territory to the Djinang people.
However, oil drilling by the Naphtha Petroleum Company brought about the closure of the proposed mission site, which therefore was relocated to Milingimbi.
[10] Following this twofold usurpation of their key homeland isles, the Yan-nhaŋu then found Milingimbi subject to an influx of other Yolŋu peoples from the mainland, who were drawn to the Mission.
In the early 1990s a young anthropologist, conversing in Djambarrpuyŋu with an elderly woman, Laurie Baymarrwangga, on a beach on the island of Murruŋga, discovered that she was still fluent in a language that had been barely recorded, apart from a minimal glossary of some 300 words[12] Working together they recorded over the following decades a lexicon with over 4,000 words and a descriptive grammar of the language, together with a detailed mapping of their ecological and cosmological lore.