The Locative Case

The locative is used to talk about where something happened. Gudjal doesn’t use different words for ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘at’, instead it uses a ‘location’ ending on the word for where something happens. This covers all three meanings: ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘at’, and can also mean ‘in the general area of’ or ‘next to’.

The location ending has five different forms: -ngga, -da, -nda, -ba and -dja, depending on the word it joins to. When it joins onto a word that ends in a vowel, the location ending to use is -ngga, like yaru-ngga ‘in/on here’.