Language
The Warlpiri language is a member of the group known as the Yapa languages, the name Yapa coming from the word for 'Aboriginal person' in most of the languages, its closest relative being Warlmanpa. Most Warlpiri-speakers are bilingual with English. Many also speak one or more of: Arrernte, Jaru, Western Desert Language, Warumungu, or other neighboring languages. Indigenous sign language is also an important component of Warlpiri communication; all of these languages had highly developed sign forms.
Read more about this topic: Warlpiri People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He had not failed to observe how harmoniously gigantic language and a microscopic topic go together.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)