A Year in Language, Day 330: Lardil and Damin Lardil is a native language of Australia, part of the 1/8th of the native tongues there not a part of the Pama-Nyungan family. Instead it is part of the Tangkic family, though there are proposed structures that link this family to Pama-Nyungan. It is highly endangered, with only 60 or so speakers, having fared poorly, like many natives, under the colonial Australian government and its policies of active destruction of native language and culture. Damin is, strictly speaking, just a register of Lardil, using the same grammar but different words and sounds. However the Lardil people, and the related Yangkaal people who also use Damin, consider it a distinct language. Damin was taught to men during a coming of age ceremony. Once they had learned it they could use it both within and without of ritual context, so long as it was not taught outside of the prescribed ceremony. Damin is noteworthy for having clicks, the only language outside of Africa to use them as a regular speech sound. Damin had a significantly reduced vocabulary, likely designed within the cultural philosophies of the peoples using it. Lardil itself has the distinctive lack of fricative consonants typical only in Australia, those being consonants like /s/, /f/, etc. It also contains a particularly elaborate list of kinship terms, including not only words for hyper-specific types of familial relationships, but also words for certain pairs of relationships, as in this example, stolen shamelessly from Wikipedia: "kangkariwarr": "pair of people, one of whom is the paternal great uncle/aunt or grandparent of the other"