also called: | Marekaganda |
various spellings: |  |
Marramaninjsji was traditionally spoken in an area to the east of the Docherty Hills and to the south of the Dilke Range. Only two or three full speakers of the language are said to remain, and there is otherwise effectively no memory of it amongst contemporary Daly River communities.
There is also little information on it, with Tryon’s word-list and sketch grammar (1968, 1970, 1974) providing the only published information thus far. Green (1990 ms; this website) builds on Tryon’s preliminary account, with a core phonological and morphological overview, a learner’s guide and an expanded wordlist, prepared for the Marramaninjsi community’s Kwombom Association under the language instruction of the late Ellen Sullivan, Lena Porter, and Maudie Arriu.
Marramaninjsi is a member of the Western Daly family, and appears to have a particularly close relationship with Brinkin, the Marrithiyel dialect of which lies to its immediate north-west.
Ian Green’s corpus of Marramaninjsji consists of 6 hours of recordings, including some texts and grammatical elicitation.
The recordings were made with the following speakers:
IG4-001, Marramaninjsji, 01/05/90, audio (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter)
IG4-002, Marramaninjsji, 22/05/1990 (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter)
IG4-003, Marramaninjsji, 22/05/90 (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter)
IG4-004, Marramaninjsji, 02/05/1990, audio (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter)
IG4-005, Marramaninjsji, 01/01/90, audio (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter)
IG4-006, Marramaninjsji, 21/06/90 (as spoken by: Sullivan; Porter; Melyin)
IG8-009, MalakMalak, 03/12/90, audio (as spoken by: Tapnguk)
IG8-012, MalakMalak, 15/05/91, audio (as spoken by: Tapnguk)