Rigsby (2005 p.c.) says there appears to be two languages that go by the name Ayapathu: Ayapathu (Y60) and Western Ayapathu Y181. Western Ayapathu only recently became known. According to Rigsby (2005), Yintjingka, a language name reported by Thomson, is the Indigenous name for the area around Port Stewart and the language Thomson reported in this area is coastal Ayapathu.
Previously, coastal Ayapathu was not included as a separate record in AUSTLANG but it now has a distinct code Y236.
Verstraete and Rigsby adopt the use of Yintyingka as the name of both the variety previously identified as coastal Ayapathu and as the language name, of which Ayapathu and Yintyingka (previously Coastal Ayapathu) Y236 are dialects. They reason that Yintyingka is connected with the 'earliest and largest body of work', it is 'best established in ethnographic literature', and it avoids ambiguity with the 'structurally different' Western Ayapathu Y181 (2015:14-15).
The inland, centering around Ebagoola and extending north towards Coen along the range, also along the coast from Running Creek to the Stewart River (Rigsby 1992:357). It is the language whose speakers are said to have lived mainly from Coen south to around Ebagoola and on the upper Holroyd River (Rigsby 2005:footnote). Port Stewart is situated in the estate of the coastal Ayapthu-speaking clan and the neighbouring coastal estates to the north and south were owned by other coastal Ayapathu-speaking clans (Rigsby 2005:footnote 27). The indigenous language with the widest use at Port Stewart in 1928 seems to have been Impila (Rigsby 2005:135).
From north of Ebagoola south to Musgrave; west to headwaters of Coleman and Holroyd rivers; east to Dividing Range and Violet Vale (Tindale 1974).
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Speaker numbers were measured differently across the censuses and various other sources listed in AUSTLANG. You are encouraged to refer to the sources.
Speaker numbers for ‘NILS 2004’ and ‘2005 estimate’ come from 'Table F.3: Numbers of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages (various surveys)' in 'Appendix F NILS endangerment and absolute number results' in McConvell, Marmion and McNicol 2005, pages 198-230 (PDF, 2.5MB).
