Southern Daly languages


The Southern Daly languages are a proposed family of two distantly related Australian aboriginal languages. They are:
Southern Daly is a distant and problematic relationship.
Murrinh-Patha was once thought to be an isolate, due to lexical data: It has, at most, an 11-percent shared vocabulary with any other language against which it has been compared. However, Murrinh-patha and Ngan’gityemerri correspond closely in their verbal inflections. Green makes a case that the formal correspondences in core morphological sequences of their finite verbs are too similar to have come about through anything other than a shared genetic legacy from a common parent language. Nonetheless, lexically they have almost nothing in common, other than cognates in their words for 'thou' and 'this' , and it is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.