Other names and spellings include Barera, Bawera, Burada, Bureda, Burera, An-barra (Anbarra), Gidjingaliya, Gu-jingarliya, Gu-jarlabiya, Gun-Guragone (also used for Guragone), Jikai, Tchikai.
The Djangu people have a Burarra clan, which is sometimes confused with this language.[3]
Burarra is a prefixing non-Pama-Nyungan language. Along with Gurr-goni, it makes up the Burarran branch of the Maningrida language family (which also includes Ndjébbana and Na-kara).[4][5][6]
The Burarra people are from the Blyth and Cadell River regions of Central and North-central Arnhem Land, but many now reside further west in Maningrida township at the mouth of the Liverpool River.[4][7]
Glasgow (1994) distinguishes three dialects of Burarra: Gun-nartpa (Mu-golarra / Mukarli group from the Cadell River region), Gun-narta (An-barra, western side of the mouth of the Blythe River), and Gun-narda (Martay, eastern side of the Blythe River).[7] These dialect names derive from each dialect's word for the demonstrative "that". She further notes that the two latter dialects (Gun-narta and Gun-narda) are frequently grouped together and referred to by their eastern neighbours as "Burarra", and by themselves as "Gu-jingarliya" ('language'/'with tongue').
Green (1987) distinguishes two dialects: Gun-nartpa and Burarra (Gu-jingarliya), but notes that noticeable dialectal differences exist within the group of Burarra speakers.[4]
In most cases, fortis and lenis refers to the voicing in consonants where fortis is voiceless and lenis is voiced.[9] In this case, plosives are distinguished by intra-oral peak pressure and stricture duration. Fortis consonants are usually longer in duration and have a greater intra-oral pressure while lenis consonants can often be pronounced as fricatives or approximants. The Burarra language also allows for the clustering of consonants.[8]
Burarra is a prefixing, multiple-classifying language. Verbs co-reference their subjects and objects through the use of prefixes, and inflect for tense and status. Serial verbs can be used to express categories like aspect, compound action and causation.[4]
Nouns inflect for case and belong to one of four noun classes (an-, jin-, mun- and gun-).[4][7]
Elwell, Vanessa (1982). "Some social factors affecting multilingualism among Aboriginal Australians: a case study of Maningrida". International Journal of the Sociology of Language (36): 83–103. doi:10.1515/ijsl.1982.36.83.
Glasgow, Kathleen (1981). "Burarra phonemes". Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A(PDF). Vol. 5. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. 63–89. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 April 2021.
Glasgow, Kathleen (1981). "Burarra orthography". Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A(PDF). Vol. 5. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. pp. 91–101. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 April 2021.
Green, Rebecca (2003). "Proto Maningrida within Proto Arnhem: evidence from verbal inflectional suffixes". In Evans, N. (ed.). The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent's most linguistically complex region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 369–421. doi:10.15144/PL-552.369. hdl:1885/254183.
Handelsmann, Robert (1996). Needs Survey of Community Languages: Central Arnhem Land, Northern Territory (Maningrida and Outstations) (Report). Canberra: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Trefry, D. (1983). "Discerning the back vowels /u/ and /o/ in Burarra, a language of the Australian Northern Territory". Working Papers of the Speech and Language Research Centre. 3 (6): 19–51.
^ abcdefgGreen, Rebecca (1987). A sketch grammar of Burarra (Honours thesis). Canberra: Australian National University.
^Elwell, Vanessa (1977). Multilingualism and lingua francas among Australian Aborigines: A case study of Maningrida (Honours thesis). Canberra: Australian National University.
^O'Grady, G.N.; Voegelin, C.F. (1967). "Languages of the world: Indo-Pacific Fascicle Six". Anthropological Linguistics. 8 (2). JSTOR30029431.
^ abcGlasgow, Kathleen (1994). Burarra–Gun-nartpa dictionary with English finder list. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
^ abcdGraetzer, Naomi (2005). An Acoustic Study of Coarticulation: Consonant-Vowel and Vowel-to-Vowel Coarticulation in Four Australian Languages (MA thesis). University of Melbourne. pp. 37–39.
