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For the village in Iran, see Damin, Iran.
Pronunciation [t̺əmiːn]
Created by the Lardil tribe
Setting and usage Initiation language for men, used by the Lardil tribe of Mornington Island
Extinct unknown
Language codes
ISO 639-3 None (mis)
Glottolog None
Linguasphere 29-TAA-bb


The Lardil word Demiin can be translated as being silent.





Once Damin had been learned, the speakers were known as Demiinkurlda ("Damin possessors"). They spoke the register particularly in ritual contexts, but also in everyday secular life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like.

Linguistic features[edit]

Damin is the only click language outside Africa.

Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday language. With only about 150 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil or Yangkaal. It had only two pronouns (n!a "me" (ego) and n!u "not me" (alter)), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and had an antonymic prefix kuri- (jijuu "small", kurijijuu "large").

Grammatically, the Damin registers of the Lardil and Yangkaal use all the grammatical morphology of those languages, and so therefore are broadly similar.


Damin words have three of Lardil's four pairs of vowels, [a, aː, i, iː, u, uː]; the fourth, [ə, əː], occurs in grammatical suffixes. It uses only some of the (pulmonic) consonants as everyday Lardil, but this is augmented by four other airstream mechanisms: lingual ingressive (the nasal clicks), glottalic egressive (a velar ejective), pulmonic ingressive (an indrawn lateral fricative), and lingual egressive (a bilabial 'spurt'). The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography and IPA equivalents, are:[1]

Bilabial Denti-
Alveolar Postalveolar Velar
laminal apical apical laminal
Plosive voiceless b [p] th [t̻] d [t̺] § j [t̠ʲ]
j2 [t̠ʲ\t̠ʲ, ɕʲ]
k [k]
ejective k' [kʼ]
Nasal voiced § § n [n̺] § ny [n̠ʲ] ng [ŋ]
voiceless ng* [ŋ̊]
Flap rr [ɾ]
Trill pr [ʙ]
pr2 [ʙ\ʙ]
Approximant central § y [j] w [w]
lateral §
Click nasal m! [ʘ̃] nh!2 [ʇ̃\ʇ̃] n! [ʗ̃]
n!2 [ʗ̃\ʗ̃]
rn! [ʗ̃˞˞ ]
oral egressive p' [ʘ↑]
Fricative voiceless f [ɸ]
voiceless ingressive l* [ɬ↓ʔ]
Affricate pf [ᵖɸ]

§ These sounds are found in standard Lardil, but not in Damin, apart from grammatical words and suffixes.

L* is described as "ingressive with egressive glottalic release".

Damin consonant clusters at the beginning of a word are p'ny, p'ng, fny, fng, fy, prpry, thrr. Words in normal Lardil may not begin with a cluster. However, Lardil has several clusters in the middle of words, and many of these are not found in Damin words, as Damin only allows syllable-final n and rr.

The origin of Damin[edit]

The origin of Damin is unclear. The Lardil and the Yangkaal say that Damin was created by a mythological figure in Dreamtime. Hale et al. believe that it was invented by Lardil elders; it has several aspects found in language games around the world, such as turning nasal occlusives such as m and n into nasal clicks, doubling consonants, and the like. Evans et al., after studying the mythology of both tribes, speculate that it was the Yangkaal elders who invented Damin and passed it to the Lardil.

Current situation[edit]



  1. ^ Kenneth Hale and David Nash, 1997. Lardil and Damin Phonotactics, pp.247-259 in Boundary Rider: Essays in honour of Geoffrey O'Grady, ed. by Darrell Tryon & Michael Walsh. Pacific Linguistics C-136.
    The IPA is not clear. For example, jj is described as alternatively a voiced fricative, but transcribed as a voiceless fricative [ʆ], an obsolete variant of [ɕ]. Other transcriptions are apparently wrong, such as transcribing supposedly apical rn! as laminal [ⁿǂ].
  • K. Hale and D. Nash, "Damin and Lardil Phonotactics". In Tryon & Walsh, eds, Boundary rider: essays in honour of Geoffrey O'Grady (1997)

External links[edit]