Cultural Day 2024  ...

We are often asked about the various spellings of Nharangga, and which to use. The various spellings arose through the differences in Nharangga language sounds and the English alphabet’s inability to replicate them accurately. The unfamilar sounds to foreign ears resulted in around eight different spellings being used over the years, of which ‘Narungga’ was the most commonly used in recent times. Being an ancient oral language, a consistent contemporary spelling structure had to be built around it during recovery to enable it to be taught in today’s world. Consequently the ‘Nh’ at the beginning of Nharangga was adopted during the community language recovery workshops to best replicate the sound of the word spoken traditionally, and Narungga is the English version. Here at NAPA, after more than twenty years of dedicated language recovery, we changed the spelling of the organisation to reflect that, and always use the traditional spelling when referring to people, language, culture or Country.