Yangkaal

Yangkaal is a Tangkic language of Forsyth Island and the north-eastern Wellesley Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland — closely related to Lardil and Kayardild. With perhaps a single fluent first-language speaker remaining, it is effectively dormant. Yangkaal and Lardil were the only two languages whose senior men used the Damin auxiliary register — the famous secret men's ceremonial speech that uses click consonants (otherwise unknown in any Australian language) and a radically restricted vocabulary built up by semantic abstraction over the everyday lexicon. Most published Tangkic material focuses on Lardil and Kayardild; Yangkaal-specific lexical forms are not separately documented at the precision required for confident Swadesh entries, so the cells here are left blank rather than guessed.