Penile subincision was traditionally performed on the island for those wanting to learn a complex ceremonial language called Damin.
Damin |
Dahalo is one of very few outside southern Africa to have phonemic clicks (the others being Sandawe and Hadza in East Africa and Damin, a mutually unintelligible register of Lardil, spoken mainly on Mornington Island in Australia).
According to Ken Hale, who studied Damin, no ritual initiations have been carried out in the Gulf of Carpentaria for half a century, and hence the language has also died out.