Damin (Lardil ceremonial register)

Damin (also spelled Demiin) is not a separate language but the secret ceremonial auxiliary register of Lardil (and historically also Yangkaal), used only by men who had passed through the second-stage Warama initiation on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It consists of roughly 200 lexical items, each one compressing a whole class of ordinary Lardil meanings (e.g. n!aa covers all kin of one's own moiety, didi all kin of the opposite moiety), so the same 200 items can in principle re-express anything Lardil expresses, but at a higher level of semantic abstraction. Phonologically it is one of the most exotic systems ever described: it contains click stops (including a bilabial click ʘ — otherwise found only in Khoisan languages and a handful of ritual registers), an ingressive lateral fricative that appears to be unique cross-linguistically, ejectives, and a nasalised egressive labio-lingual trill — none of which exist in Lardil itself or in any other Australian language. Damin was deliberately constructed as a phonological inversion of ordinary Lardil. The last initiations stopped around 1980; the register is effectively dormant today, though small fragments survive in older memory. Documented by Kenneth Hale's 1960s field work (Hale 1973) and Hale & Nash (1997) "Damin and Lardil phonotactics".