Sounds Activity 1
1: Riservato is Italian for ‘reserved’ or ‘booked’. There are generally no ‘s’ sounds in
Australian Aboriginal languages, so you can guess it’s not Aboriginal by the fact that there is
an ‘s’.
2: Buwaarr is the Gumbaynggirr word for ‘baby’. Buwaarr begins with a consonant as do
most words in NSW Aboriginal languages. Words beginning with vowels are rare. There is
more than one syllable in this word, which is a common feature of Australian Aboriginal
languages. The long vowel aa, written in this form, indicates that it is different from a.
Several NSW languages, and indeed many Australian languages, have three long vowels
and three short vowels. It is possible for two words to be exactly the same except for vowel
length and so have two different meanings.
3: Oswobodzić is a Polish word meaning ‘to free’. The features that clearly identify it as non
Aboriginal are: the ‘s’ and ‘z’ because ‘s, z, sh, ch, f, v’ are not found in Aboriginal
languages. Also, ‘o’ is not a common vowel sound in Australian Aboriginal languages.
4: Gratuito is an adjective in Spanish meaning ‘free’. (The word is also found in Italian).
Having two or more consonants together at the beginning or end of words, such as ‘gr’ in
gratuito, is not a common feature of Australian Aboriginal languages.
5: Nhama means ‘the’ or ‘that’ in Yuwaalaraay, Yuwaalayaay and Gamilaraay. The nh sound
at the beginning is not a sound found at the beginning of words in English. While it may be
found in other world languages too, it is a distinctive feature of Australian Aboriginal
languages. Notice that the two letters ‘nh’ represent only one sound, unlike ‘gr’ above which
is two sounds and is a consonant cluster.
6: O is a Samoan word which has several meanings, one of which is ‘there’. Aboriginal
words generally have more than one syllable, so if you were to clap out the syllables of a
word you would have two or more claps/syllables. Also, most Australian Aboriginal words
begin with a consonant not a vowel (i.e. not a, i, u).
7: Kimoua is a Tongan word meaning ‘you two’. The vowel cluster at the end, is not a feature
of Australian Aboriginal languages. Vowels in Australian languages are usually separated by
consonants. (i.e. b, d, g, l, ng, y, w etc. as in ngaya which means ‘I’ in several aboriginal
languages.)
8: Guwiiny in Wiradjuri can have the meaning ‘she’, ‘he’ or ‘it’. The word is clearly identified
as from an Australian Aboriginal language because of the following features:

has two syllables (more than one syllable)

does not begin with a vowel

uses two of the typical three Australian vowels (a, i, u)

ends with the sound ny, which is a common feature of Australian Aboriginal
languages.
9: Nakalaang is a word from Tagalog, from the Philippines , meaning ‘for’ and ‘thing which is
being given’. The word could be mistaken for an Australian Aboriginal word, because it:

has more than one syllable (four in fact)

begins with a consonant

uses one of the normal three Australian vowels (a, i, u)

appears to have a long vowel. However, the aa in nakalaang is pronounced as two
separate ‘a’s which is not the case in Australian languages. (The Australian
convention of writing aa, ii, uu is intended to represent long vowels.)
10: Dana is found both in an Australian Aboriginal language (Dharug) where it means ‘foot’
and in Croatian where it means ‘day’. This sort of thing happens from time to time with
languages. Sometimes the words may be related, but often, as in this case, it is just
coincidence. The fact that dana has more than one syllable; has one of a set of three short
vowels (a, i, u), and has no fricatives or sibilants (s, z, sh, ch, f, v) suggests that it could be a
word from an Australian Aboriginal language.