the ceremonial language Damin

Damin was a secret language spoken only by initiated men on three islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, south of New Guinea. It has many remarkable qualities; for example, it is the only non-African language to use clicks as part of its regular phonemic inventory. It seems pretty clear that Damin was an invented language, and a cleverly built one, but unfortunately it has become extinct. This is a compilation of the information I’ve been able to find about Damin.

excerpt from R. M. W. Dixon's book The Languages of Australia (1980):

Kenneth Hale has described an interesting speech style called Damin, which was used until recently among initiated men of the Lardil tribe, on Mornington Island.

The striking feature of Damin is its phonology - besides the consonantal inventory of everyday Lardil (six stops, six nasals, a lateral, two rhotics and two semi-vowels),Damin also has four nasalized clicks - bilabial /m!/, dental /nh!/, apico-alveolar /n!/ and apico-domal /n.!/ - an ingressive lateral fricative /L/, a glottalised, or ejective, velar stop /k'/ and an ejective bilabial stop /p'/. No other language in Australia has sounds of this nature; Hale remarks that the nasalised clicks are like those found in Khosian languages of southern Africa but that he knows of no language with sounds like those which he symbolises by /L/ and /p'/ (the latter is formed not with glottalic pressure, but by creating pressure between the tongue and the bilabial closure). Damin has a system of only three vowels, a, i, and u, with contrastive length, whereas everyday Lardil distinguishes long and short varieties of four vowels, a, i, u and e.

The phonetician J. C. Catford has pointed out that Damin employs five phonetic initiation types - pulmonic egressive (which characterises ALL sounds in most other Australian languages), pulmonic ingressive (/L/), velaric ingressive (the clicks), velaric egressive (/p'/) and glottalic egressive (/k'/). No other language in the world has this variety of initiation types, leading Catford to 'perhaps hypothesize that [Damin's] sound system is a deliberately invented one.' (Interestingly, the Lardil attribute Damin to a legendary personality called Kalthad 'yellow trevally.')

Damin has a small vocabulary, perhaps no more than 250 words in all. It works mostly in terms of generics - m!i refers to any member of the class of vegetable foods, thuu is used for large sea-dwelling mammals such as dugongs and turtles, thii for elasmobranch fish (stingrays and sharks), Li for bony fish, n!un!u for liquids, and so on. Detailed specification is possible in Damin by appropriate modification of the generic noun: wiitjpur is the Damin term for various woods and wooden objects but a precise correspondent of Lardil mungkumu 'wooden axe' can be given by m!iwu titi-i-n wiitjpur, literally 'sugar-bag (= honey) chopping stick,' a reference to one of its major uses.

There is a Damin form for the negative pole of each major adjectival opposition, the positive term being derived by preposing kuri-, e.g. tjitjuu 'small,' kuritjituu 'large.' While Lardil has nineteen pronouns and several demonstratives, Damin has a two-term opposition, n!a 'ego' and n!u 'other' (no other language in the world is known to lack a contrast between first, second and third person singular pronouns). All bound grammatical forms are, however, identical to everyday Lardil. The fact that the suffixes used with Damin words are from Lardil (rather than being related to Lardil) can be seen from the occurrence of the normal four vowels of Lardil in these suffixes, as against the three-vowel system of Damin roots. Damin plainly involves the same semantic and grammatical system as Lardil, although lexical representation is at a more generic level; despite the phonological differences it is essentially a further variety of the Lardil language, rather than being any sort of separate language.

A 1995 issue of MIT's Tech Talk said this:


One example of a language closely linked to its culture is Damin, an 
auxiliary language spoken by the Lardil people of Mornington Island off 
Queensland, Australia. Damin is nearly unique in being an invented 
language phonologically distinct from the one on which it is based, but 
with sounds found nowhere else in the world, Professor Hale said. It was 
taught to novices in the advanced stage of men's initiation and used as 
a means of communication between initiates and teachers; ordinary Lardil 
could not be used until the ritual initiation debt was repaid.

Theoretically, Damin can be learned in just a day because it uses 
abstract names for families of concepts, so for example, the 19 Lardil 
pronouns are replaced by just two in Damin- one to describe any set that 
includes the speaker and one for a set that does not. Thus, only 200 new 
elements must be learned.

The last fluent speaker of Damin died several years ago, as its use was 
forbidden by authorities who viewed wealth in material rather than 
intellectual terms, Professor Hale said in his paper. Indeed, many of 
the Lardil people themselves "don't realize that in their heads, they 
have something that's a tower of intellectual achievement," he said.

In the Spring 2000 issue of Whole Earth magazine, Kenneth Hale said "The loss of Damin, for example, the initiates' language of the Lardil people of Mornington Island, North Queensland, amounts to the loss of a tradition of semantic relations comparable to that embodied in the very best thesaurus, or in the entire output of the anthropological tradition of componential analysis of the fifties and sixties." (There is no further mention of Damin in the Whole Earth article.)

The book Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley (2003, ISBN: 061823649X) devoted a few paragraphs to describing Damin. According to this book, boys were circumcised after puberty and then taught a sign language. For one year, this sign language was the only means they were permitted to use when communicating with those who had attended the ceremony. Young men who wanted to pass through the next stage of initiation endured a painful procedure called penile subincision and then were taught the spoken language Damin.

Quoting from the book, “The language’s lexicon was small: just a couple of hundred basic words. But by ingeniously manipulating those words, initiated men could express almost anything they needed to say. Suppose a Damin speaker saw a sandpiper in flight. ‘Sandpiper’ was not in Damin’s lexicon. But the watcher could evoke the bird by saying ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu: literally, ‘person-burning creature.’ The phrase harks back to a creation story in which Sandpiper starts a lethal fire— a familiar tale to all speakers of Damin. Likewise an axe was ‘honey-affecting wood’: a wooden object used to obtain wild honey. Because it imposed this rigorous, semi-abstract vocabulary on the familiar syntax of Lardil, Damin could be learned in a few days. Initiated men would speak it at ceremonial gatherings, but also while searching for food or just sitting around gossiping. Extreme suffering had brought a gift of sacred knowledge.”