Welcome to the home page for the basic online Reuther Diyari Dictionary.

From 1903 to 1906 Rev. J.G. Reuther created a four-volume Dictionary of the Diyari language spoken in the far north of South Australia. This is the user-friendly edited version of Rev. Philipp Scherer’s (1981) English translation of Rev. J.G. Reuther’s 1906 Diari-German Dictionary. It was created by Peter K. Austin, Edward Garrett, and David Nathan. There is a more detailed specialist edition available at www.diyari.org.

Diyari (also spelled Diari or Dieri) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in the far northeast of South Australia (see www.diyari.org).

To view the dictionary click Dictionary in the navigation bar and you will see a list of entries beginning with the letter 'a'. Click on a different letter to see words beginning with that letter. If you scroll down and click on a particular word it will open up and display its full dictionary information.

To look for English or Diyari words in the dictionary use the Search box. Type the first few letters of the word you are interested in and you will see a drop-down list of words in the Dictionary that begin with those letters. Choose the one you want and click Search. You will be presented by all occurrences of the search word in entries and examples. You can click on the highlighted links in each search result to go to the relevant dictionary entries or to the examples of their use.

A classified list of all the notes in the Dictionary can be found under the Notes tab.

Notice that Diyari words are spelled according to the orthography used by the missionaries, including Reuther. This is different from modern spelling, as explained under the More tab.

This dictionary project was funded by a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship awarded to Peter K. Austin for 2020-2023. This provided funds for research assistance, and travel and accommodation to visit the Diyari community in 2022 and 2023. We are grateful for this financial support.

© 2023 Peter K. Austin