Yanyuwa

The Yanyuwa are a saltwater Aboriginal people of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory, holding the coast around and opposite the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands near the mouth of the McArthur River.

Their tongue is a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngarna group, unusual in maintaining distinct men's and women's dialects; boys grew up speaking the women's form and switched to men's speech at initiation.

From the 1720s Makassan trepangers from Sulawesi visited their shores, arriving with the December north-westerlies and leaving on the April south-easterlies. Trade relations were close enough that Yanyuwa men sometimes sailed back with the prau fleets and stayed for months at Makassar; many Gulf peoples used Makassan as a trade lingua franca and its words entered their languages.