Damin linguistic features

Damin is the only click language outside Africa.

Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday language. With only about 150 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil or Yangkaal. It had only two pronouns (n!a "me" (ego) and n!u "not me" (alter)), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and had an antonymic prefix kuri- (jijuu "small", kurijijuu "large").

Grammatically, the Damin registers of the Lardil and Yangkaal use all the grammatical morphology of those languages, and so therefore are broadly similar.

Phonetics
Damin words have three of Lardil's four pairs of vowels, ; the fourth,, occurs in grammatical suffixes. It uses only some of the (pulmonic) consonants as everyday Lardil, but this is augmented by four other airstream mechanisms: lingual ingressive (the nasal clicks), glottalic egressive (a velar ejective), pulmonic ingressive (an indrawn lateral fricative), and lingual egressive (a bilabial 'spurt'). The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography and IPA equivalents, are:

§ These sounds are found in standard Lardil, but not in Damin, apart from grammatical words and suffixes.

L* is described as "ingressive with egressive glottalic release".

Damin consonant clusters at the beginning of a word are p'ny, p'ng, fny, fng, fy, prpry, thrr. Words in normal Lardil may not begin with a cluster. However, Lardil has several clusters in the middle of words, and many of these are not found in Damin words, as Damin only allows syllable-final n and rr.