West Barkly

West Barkly is the name for the Mirndi-family languages of the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory, a grassland country east of the Victoria River district. Its westernmost tongue is Jingulu, spoken by the Jingili around Elliott and remarkable for its well-developed signed form; to its east lie Ngarnka and the closely related Wambaya, Gudanji and Binbinka of the McArthur River country, often treated as dialects of a single language.

When the first British colony in Australia was founded in 1788, these were the languages of the Tableland's peoples. Unusually for non-Pama–Nyungan tongues, they build their grammar with suffixes rather than prefixes, and the links between Jingulu and the eastern languages are seen as contact rather than common descent.