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A. Tribes and Dialects
In general, the blacks of the Bloomfield River District may be spoken of as those occupying the forest - and those dwelling in the scrublands: the former are known as ma^ -ji-ji, the latter as ba^-ti-ji.
To specialise each mob does not call itself by any tribal name other than that referring to the name of its own particular district, to which the suffix -a^- ra is added:
thus, Bannabillara = aboriginals occupying Bannabilla
Yalimba -ara = aboriginals occupying Yalimba etc
Kiar - ara = aboriginals occupying Kiar etc
Several of these mobs however speak the same dialect, the different dialect being more or less naturally intelligible. The particular names of the dialects have all of them the prefix ko-ko, signifying ”voice” or ”speech”, the remaining portions of the name indicating some peculiarity ?: eg.
Kokobuldja = speech - abrupt
Kokopiddaji = speech ”? - devil” - a term employed in the sense of pity & compassion.
Kokoyalanji = Speech of the yalanji - a tribe with head camp at Boggy Creek
Kokowara = speech ”crooked”, in the sense of difficulty of comprehension - being markedly different from the neighbouring dialects.
Great confusion has thus arisen among Europeans from the fact that the name of the language has been applied to the tribe found to be speaking it: perhaps only in the case of the Kokowara is the exception to be found, in that other blacks speak of the Kokowara as a tribe - what these Kokowara actually call themselves I have not yet been able to discover.
Bannabilla (Osmundson’s selection - occasionally converted into ”banana billy”. Ban-na-bil-la is the country at the mouth of the Bloomfield River: The mob here includes