Gale, Mary-AnneAmery, RobSimpson, JaneWilkins, David P2023-05-190726-8602http://hdl.handle.net/1885/292053Ngarrindjeri, a language from southern South Australia, is being revived on the basis of material recorded from 1840 until the 1960s. This material shows a heavy use of three types of pronouns, suggesting a language that is ‘pronoun happy’. When reviving a language, it is essential to know how pronouns work, but the earliest source does not include the kinds of texts that allow analysis of how speakers use pronouns. Texts representing actual connected free speech in Ngarrindjeri are not attested until nearly a century later, by Ronald and Catherine Berndt and Norman Tindale. We compare the forms, meanings and second position distribution of Ngarrindjeri pronouns over time and across sources, considering dialect variation and language change. We show that the pronoun form-meaning pairs in texts recorded in the 1930s and 1940s are consistent with those recorded in the nineteenth century, and so we can have some confidence in using the Berndt and Tindale texts to reconstruct pronoun function. Confidence is further enhanced by showing the similarity in pronoun functions in texts recorded on the same topic from the same speaker, Albert Karloan, by the Berndts and Tindale. This review of Ngarrindjeri pronouns opens up possibilities for language revivalists.This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under the Discovery Grant DP150103287: ‘Analysis of Ngarrindjeri texts of the Lower Murray, Lakes & Coorong region, as recorded in the book: A World That Was by Ronald & Catherine Berndt’, and the ARC Centre of Excel- lence for the Dynamics of Language CE140100041application/pdfen-AU© 2021 The Australian Linguistic Societyhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Ngarrindjeripronounslanguage changereference tracking202110.1080/07268602.2021.19678752022-03-13CC BY-NC-ND