Australian grammar

Australian Grammar (Australian: satarbasang astrelya) is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Australian language, one of the official languages in Australia. In Australian, there are four basic parts of speech: nouns (including pronouns), verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words (or particles). Nouns and verbs may be basic roots, but frequently they are derived from other words by means of prefixes and suffixes.

For clarity, stressed syllables are marked with an acute ⟨á⟩, stressed syllables ending in a glottal stop with a circumflex ⟨â⟩, and unstressed syllables ending in a glottal stop with a grave ⟨à⟩, as these distinctions are phonemic in Australian phonology, though not in its orthography.

Word order

Australian has a strict verb-initial word order, wherein the order of other arguments is optional and may be rearranged for different pragmatic purposes.

B⟨in⟩acâ=ngya kerítan

⟨PAT.FOC.⟩read=3.SG.IDR book

"She reads a book"

In Australian, there is also a strong tendency to promote the focus argument, in this case the patient keritan "book" to front of an utterance, occurring directly after a verb, however this is not mandatory.