Yanyuwa () is the language of the Yanyuwa people of the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria outside Borroloola () in the Northern Territory, Australia. Yanyuwa, like many other Australian Aboriginal languages, is a highly agglutinative language with ergative-absolutive alignment, whose grammar is pervaded by a set of 16 noun classes whose agreements are complicated and numerous. Yanyuwa is a critically endangered language. The anthropologist John Bradley has worked with the Yanyuwa people for three decades and is also a speaker of Yanyuwa. He has produced a large dictionary and grammar of the language, along with a cultural atlas in collaboration with a core group of senior men and women. Phonology Yanyuwa is extremely unusual in having 7 places of articulation for stops, compared to 3 for English and 4–6 for most other Australian languages. Also unusual is the fact that Yanyuwa has no voiceless phoneme, as all its consonants are voiced (vowels are by default voiced, as is the norm in most languages). Consonants Vowels Morphology Noun classes Yanyuwa has 16 noun classes, distinguished by prefixes. In some cases, different prefixes are used, depending on whether the speaker is a male or a female. Notes Women's speech. Men's speech. is a more formal female/feminine prefix often used in elicitations, and is the informal everyday form. There is only one word in Yanyuwa, "girl", in which the prefix is always used. That distinguishes it from the men's speech form "boy" for which women say . is used to indicate no prefix. Male and female dialects Yanyuwa is unusual among languages of the world in that it has separate dialects for men and for women at the morphological level. The only time that men use the women's dialect is if they are quoting someone of the opposite sex and vice versa. An example of this speech is provided below: (w) (m) The little boy went down to the river and saw his brother. The BBC reported in 2018 that there were 3 fluent female speakers worldwide. Speech styles In Yanyuwa, certain words have synonyms used to replace the everyday term in certain cultural situations. Avoidance speech Avoidance speech is speech style used when talking to or near certain relatives: one's siblings and cousins of the opposite sex, one's brother-in-law, sister-in-law, father-in-law and mother-in-law, and one's nieces and nephews if their father (for male speakers) or their