Central Arrernte

Abstract

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.