The Wagaydyic languages (nowadays more often referred to as the Anson Bay languages[1]) are a pair of closely related but otherwise unclassified Australian Aboriginal languages: the moribund Wadjiginy (also known as Wagaydy and Batjamalh) and the extinct Kandjerramalh (Pungupungu).
Tryon (1980) notes that the two languages are 79% cognate based on a 200-item wordlist, but there are serious grammatical differences that prevent them from being considered dialects of a single language.[2][3]
The unattested Giyug may have been a dialect of Wadjiginy or otherwise related.[4]
The Wagaydyic languages have previously been classified with Malak-Malak into a Northern Daly family, but similarities appear to be due to lexical and morphological borrowing from Malak-Malak, at least in Wadjiginy.[citation needed]
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary items of Wadjiginy and Pungupungu are from Tryon (1968).[5]
^Nordlinger, Rachel. 2017. "The languages of the Daly River region (Northern Australia)." In Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun, & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Oxford handbook of polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^Tryon, Darrell. 1980. "Pungupungu and Wadyiginy: Typologically Constrastive Dialects." In Bruce Rigsby and Peter Sutton (eds.), Papers in Australian Linguistics No.~13: Contributions to Australian Linguistics, 277-287. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
^Tryon, Darrell T. "The Daly River Languages: A Survey". In Aguas, E.F. and Tryon, D. editors, Papers in Australian Linguistics No. 3. A-14:21-49. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1968. doi:10.15144/PL-A14.21