Australia Had a Click Language Spoken Only by Initiated Men

On Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, an adolescent Lardil boy used to spend a long, hot day during his warama initiation listening to the elders shout an entirely new vocabulary at him in pairs. One man would call out a Damin word, the other its everyday Lardil equivalent. By nightfall the initiate was supposed to know the language. From then on he was permitted to speak it, and at the next ceremony he would be one of the men shouting.

Damin was a ceremonial register, used only by fully initiated men of the Lardil and Yangkaal peoples. The American linguist Kenneth Hale, who documented it in the 1960s, called it one of the most peculiar speech systems on Earth. Its sound inventory included velar ejectives, an ingressive lateral fricative produced by sucking air across the side of the tongue, and a set of nasal clicks — making Damin the only click language ever documented outside Africa. The clicks did not come from any neighboring language. Hale's reading was that the elders had invented them.

Its vocabulary was equally engineered. Where Lardil has thousands of nouns, Damin has roughly 150 root words. Each one covered a deliberately wide semantic field: li* meant any bony fish; thii meant any cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays); single words stood in for whole categories of person, plant, stone, or movement. To say something specific in Damin you had to combine these broad roots into a phrase. The result was a language a young man could memorise in an afternoon, but speak only by reasoning about what category each ordinary thing belonged to.

Fluent use died out in the 1970s, when the warama ceremonies stopped. A revival is under way, but Damin is now a language reconstructed from Hale's notes — a 150-word object that was meant to be carried inside the head of every initiated man on the island.