The Warlpiri ( or ) ( > ['waɭbɪ̆ˌɻi]) language is spoken by close to 3,000 of the Warlpiri people from the Tanami Desert, northwest of Alice Springs, Central Australia. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Pama–Nyungan family and is one of the largest Aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers. One of the most well-known terms for The Dreaming (an Aboriginal spiritual belief), Jukurrpa, derives from Warlpiri. Warnayaka (Wanayaga, Woneiga), Wawulya (Ngardilpa), and Ngalia are regarded as probable dialects of Warlpiri on the AUSTLANG database, although with potentially no data; while Ngardilypa is confirmed. Phonology In the following tables of the Warlpiri sound system, symbols in give the practical alphabet used by the Warlpiri community. Phonemic values in IPA are shown in /slashes/ and phonetic values in [square brackets]. Vowels Warlpiri has a standard three-vowel system, similar to that of Classical Arabic, with a phonemic length distinction creating a total of six possible vowels. Consonants As shown in the chart, Warlpiri distinguishes five positions of articulation and has oral and nasal stops at each position. The oral stops have no phonemic voice distinction, but they display voiced and unvoiced allophones. Stops are usually unvoiced at the beginning of a word and voiced elsewhere. In both positions, they are usually unaspirated. Warlpiri, like most other Australian languages, has no fricative consonants. Syllables and stress Warlpiri syllables are quite constrained in structure. All syllables begin with a single consonant, there are no syllable-initial consonant clusters and no syllable begins with a vowel. After the consonant is a single long or short vowel, which is sometimes followed by a single closing consonant. Open syllables are much more common than closed ones. No syllable ends with a stop or with the retroflex flap /ɽ/. The most common kind of consonant cluster occurs when a syllable ends with a nasal consonant and the next syllable begins with the corresponding stop, but other clusters like /rk/ and /lp/ also occur. Stress is not generally distinctive but is assigned by rule. Polysyllabic words receive primary stress on the first syllable, with secondary stresses tending to occur on alternate syllables thereafter; this rhythm may be broken by the structure of the word and so some three-syllable stress groups occur. Vowel harmony If two adjacent syllables in a Warlpiri morpheme have high vowels, those high vowels are almost always alike: both /u/