Evans, who introduced the cover term "Bininj Gunwok for all dialects, identifies six dialects: Kunwinjku, Kuninjku, Gundjeihmi, Manyallaluk Mayali, Kundedjnjenghmi, and two varieties of Kune most commonly known as Kune Dulerayek and Kune Narayek; based on the fact that
the phonology, grammar and lexicon of these dialects share significant clusterings of properties
these distinctions are recognised, at least by the relevant group and its neighbours, by the use of distinct language names.
As of June 2015, the Gundjeihmi dialect group officially adopted standard Kunwinjku orthography, meaning it would in future be spelt "Kundjeyhmi". , AUSTLANG, under the title "N186: Bininj Gun-Wok / Bininj Kunwok", cites Evans' grouping, but adds that others have used Kunwinjku as the equivalent of Bininj Gun-wok. It also notes that Mayali has also sometimes been used in the same way. , only three of the 12 original languages spoken in the Kakadu area are regularly spoken: Kundjeyhmi, Kunwinjku and Jawoyn. Kundjeyhmi and Kunwinjku are regarded as dialects of each other, while Jawoyn is a separate language spoken in the southern areas. Kunwinjku is spoken in the largest population centre, the township of Gunbalanya, and is the most widespread, with an ethnic population of around 900, almost all of whom speak Kunwinjku in spite of increasing exposure to English. Kundjeyhmi is spoken in the central part of Kakadu.
Phonology
Kunwinjku is typical of the languages of central Arnhem Land in having a phonemic glottal stop, two stop series, five vowels without a length contrast, relatively complex consonant clusters in codas and no essential distinction between word and syllable phonotactics.
Consonant inventory
Vowel inventory
Front
Central
Back
High
i
u
Mid
e
o
Low
a
Grammar
Kunwinjku is polysynthetic, with grammatical relations largely encoded within the complex verb. The verb carries obligatory polypersonal agreement, a number of derivational affixes and has an impressive potential for incorporation of both nouns and verbs. Nominals seem to have a lesser role in the language's grammar. Kunwinjku dialect preserved four noun classes but lost the corecase marking on the nouns, and a handful of semantic cases are optional. Kune and Manyallaluk Mayali dialects have an optional ergative marker -yih. Nominals have extensive derivational morphology and compounding.
Kunwinjku shows syntactic patterns characteristic of 'non-configurational' languages: nominal modifiers can appear without the N head, there is no rigid order within the 'nominal group', and the distinction between predicative and argumental use of nominals is hard to make.
