Dyribal Jumble from the Linguistics Roadshow
Welcome to the world of linguistics. This activity is designed to introduce you to diversity in the morphosyntax (word and sentence structure) of the world’s languages through the window of noun classes in Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language.
You will interact with real language data from Dyirbal as if you were a linguist documenting the language. You will be tasked with sorting phrases into categories, and will then come up with a semantic (meaning-based) classification for each category in your analysis. This will encourage you to consider the different ways in which languages group words according to a range of parameters.
This activity was originally developed as part of the Linguistics Roadshow project.