in a single session, but on the other hand two senior warama men admitted that they lacked a firm command of the register. Once Damin had been learned, the speakers were known as Demiinkurlda ("Damin possessors"). They spoke the register particularly in ritual contexts, but also in everyday secular life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like. Decline The cultural traditions of the Lardil and Yangkaal have been in decline for several decades, and the Lardil and Yangkaal languages are nearly extinct. The last warama ceremony was held in the 1950s, so nowadays Damin is no longer in use by either the Yangkaal or the Lardil. However, recently a revival of cultural traditions has begun, and luruku has been celebrated. It remains to be seen whether warama ceremonies will also be reactivated. Phonology Vowels Damin words had three of Lardil's four pairs of vowels, ; the fourth, , occurred in grammatical suffixes. Vowel length was not contrastive, but depended on the preceding consonant. Consonants Damin was the only click language outside Africa. Damin used only some of the (pulmonic) consonants of everyday Lardil, but they were 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'). Even some of the pulmonic egressive consonants are exotic for the Australian context: fricatives, voiceless nasals, and bilabial trills. The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography and IPA equivalents, were: § 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". There is no alveolar–retroflex distinction in Damin, with the possible exception of the clicks. However, Hale notes that the Damin alveolar and retroflex clicks (found in the pronouns , and in , respectively) might be in complementary distribution, and it is not clear that they are distinct sounds. Some of the consonants listed above only occur in clusters. only occurs as a coda. A derivational rule seems to be to pronounce all onset nasals as clicks; it is likely that is not a click because a velar click in the straightforward sense is not possible. Phonotactics 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