Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family

This article surveys the Iwaidjan language family, spoken in north-western Arnhem Land, Australia. This family contains many unusual features that set it off from the other Australian languages to which it is ultimately related, and is here presented in detail to show the degree to which individual subgroups of Australian languages can be typologically divergent from "Standard Average Australian". The article focusses on these features, in particular the very large inventory of liquid phonemes, initial mutation (in Iwaidja only), the complex verbal morphology, "subcategorized object prefixes", kinship verbs, impersonal constructions, and prepositions inflecting in agreement with their subject.