Darug is the name of the Aboriginal group of language, which was spoken mainly in and around the Sydney region by Aboriginal people. Darug is now an extinct language and its last speakers are believed to have died in the late 19th or early 20th century. As a result, Darug language now is mainly known from the written scripts.
Darug language has been divided mainly into two dialects that are based on coastal and inland locations. The coastal dialect is called lyora and the inland dialect is known as Darug. The only difference between these two languages was mainly based on vowel length. The thin borderline between these two different dialects of the Darug language has been mentioned by Watkin Tench in the year 1793.
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In the year 1987, Jim Kohen published an exclusive dictionary for the Darug inland language, which was based on a number of vocabularies, which were formerly recorded, by Hunter, Tench and Collins in the 1790’s, R.H. Mathews in 1903 and John Rowley in the year 1878.
Darug were basically the traditional Aboriginal owners of the Parramatta district. There were friendly relations between Darug inhabitants and the settlers at Parramatta. With the settling up of new metropolitan areas, the Darug inhabitants and their culture have now become a thing of the past.
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