Dhuwal (also Dual, Duala) is one of the Yolà Âu languages spoken by Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory, Australia. Although all Yolà Âu languages are mutually intelligible to some extent, Dhuwal represents a distinct dialect continuum of eight separate varieties.
According to linguist Robert M. W. Dixon,
Ethnologue divides Dhuwal into four languages, plus Dayi and the contact variety Dhuwaya (numbers are from the 2006 census.):
Dhuwaya is a stigmatised contact variant used by the younger generation in informal contexts, and is the form taught in schools, having replaced Gumatj ca. 1990.
According to historian Clare Wright, the Yirrkala bark petitions, which were presented to the Australian Parliament in August 1963, were written in a standardised Yolngu script developed by the Yirrkala missionary Beulah Lowe, based on Yolngu languages. According to an article published by the Robert Menzies Institute, this language was based on Gupapuyngu.
In 2019, Djambarrpuyà Âu became the first Indigenous language to be spoken in an Australian Parliament, when Yolà Âu man and member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly Yingiya Guyula gave a speech in his native tongue.
Vowel length is contrastive in first syllable only.
Probably every Australian language with speakers remaining has had an orthography developed for it, in each case in the Latin script. Sounds not found in English are usually represented by digraphs, or more rarely by diacritics, such as underlines, or extra symbols, sometimes borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Some examples are shown in the following table.