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mo lilwan stori

wal, mi bek iya la language centre. tudei, mela bin finijim tu mo lilwan stori blanga skul tumorra. det festwan, im bla Ngandi. Main anggurl E bin dum. Im gu:

'Wugu mirri nurudhung?'
'Ngarudhungi natjuh."
"Juyh. Nurudhung."

Im gudwan, especially because Ngandi im brabli endangered language bobala.

Det najawan im blanga Marranbala. Main baba G bin dum garrim im deda, ol Ngamayang (danja im Marra skin).

Marranbala tok:

"Nanguni gana ni-jurra-yurra?"
"Ginya wayburri nga-jurra-yurra."
"Yo. Guda mingi."

kila ngabi?

Onli Nunggubuyu mob garra dum na. Melabat garra dum dislot lilwan stori la skul tumorra, bla meigim ola students jandap en toktok gija. Maitbi gudwan! I'll let you know. :-)

Comments

Jhuny said…
I heard that Ngandi was extinct... It says so here!
5:17 pm
Greg Dickson said…
what do you trust more? a linguist who's stuck in the middle of it all, or an international publication that attempts to be an authority on over 6000 languages.

but aside from my resentment of being overruled by the ethnologue :-)...

calling a language extinct is not a straightforward matter. for example... if there are people who are partial speakers of a language, and are using it, even just to teach, can you still call the language extinct? if people know the language, but aren't using on a day to day basis, is it extinct? there's no easy answer to these questions. also, some aboriginal ppl don't like calling their languages extinct, but prefer to call them sleeping.

but i can tell you, in response to ethnologue, that there's one very old lady who is a fully fluent Ngandi speaker. And another old Ngandi lady passed away only a couple of months, and she was a full speaker... poor thing. too sad when things like that happen.
8:21 pm
Jhuny said…
Well you had better call up ethnologue and tell them they're lying. Good work keeping us informed about all these different languages, I think it's quite important. BTW I've also found this other site that Ngandi is "Virtually Extinct" which is sort of like sleeping...

And it is interesting having a kriol blog, even if I can't always make out what's going on.
11:16 pm
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