Kunjeni

The Kunjeni are the Kunjen-speaking peoples of the south-western Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, whose lands lay around the Alice and Crosbie Rivers and, further west, the Mitchell River and the Gulf Country, with the Yir-Yoront to their north-west.

Their speech, also called Uw, is a Paman language of the Pama-Nyungan family, closely related to Kuuk Thaayorre; its dialects, Uw Oykangand and Uw Olkola among them, share up to ninety-seven per cent of their core vocabulary, and well over nine-tenths of its words begin with a vowel.

It kept a separate respect register for speaking to in-laws such as a mother-in-law, replacing ordinary nouns and verbs while leaving grammatical words untouched, and the name Oykangand means language of the people from the lagoons.