This chapter sets out in broad brush some of the main trends in lexicographic work on the indigenous languages of mainland Australia and nearby islands – some of the major ones being Torres Strait Islands, Bathurst Island, Melville Island, Groote Eylandt, Mornington Island, and Bentinck Island – by missionaries, from the early days of contact with Europeans to the present. Prior to contact with Europeans, some 400 languages were indigenous to this region, depending on the criteria one adopts for languagehood; the twenty-first edition of Ethnologue lists just under 400 languages on an assortment of criteria, while R. M. W. Dixon recognizes around 250 languages based on the linguistic criterion of mutual intelligibility. These belong to twenty or thirty different families which have not to date been shown to be related to one another. Since European contact, a number of other languages have come to be spoken in Australia. These non-indigenous languages are excluded from the present chapter, except for a small number of post-contact varieties, mainly pidgins and creoles, that are currently spoken by indigenes of Australia.

The Warrwa language and its speakers

Warrwa is a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language, one of a small group of about ten languages referred to as the Nyulnyulan family (McGregor 1988). Its closest relatives are Nyikina, Yawuru and Jukun. These four languages together form the Eastern group of the family; the remaining five or six languages constitute the Western group (Stokes and McGregor 2003). The Western Nyulnyulan languages were traditionally located on the Dampier Land peninsula, to the north of Broome, in the far north-west of Western Australia. The Eastern Nyulnyulan languages were spoken in a crescent surrounding the peninsula to the south and east, extending into the Kimberley region. Warrwa itself was spoken in the north-eastern part of this crescent, in the vicinity of the present township of Derby (Burula), and eastwards along the Meda and May Rivers; see Figure 4.1. It abutted the Worrorran languages Unggarrangu and Unggumi, traditionally located to the north and east (see also maps in McGregor 1994: 6, and Tindale 1974: 259).

Today a single full speaker of Warrwa remains, aged around seventy, who lives in the township of Derby; she survives an elder brother, also a full speaker, who died in 2000. Her children (and possibly some grandchildren) have some passive knowledge of Warrwa, though they normally speak either Kriol or Aboriginal English.