The Mati Ke, also known as the Magatige, are an Aboriginal Australian people, whose traditional lands are located in the Wadeye area in the Northern Territory. Their language is in serious danger of extinction, but there is a language revival project under way to preserve it.
Mati Ke, also known as Magati-Ge, Magadige, Marti Ke, Magati Gair, is classified as one of the Western Daly languages, and bearing close affinities to Marringarr and Marrithiyel. [1] By the early 2000s, some 50 people were thought to still speak some of it as a second or third language, [2] and the last completely fluent speakers were reckoned to be three people, Johnny Chula, Patrick Nudjulu and his sister Agatha Perdjert. [3]
Norman Tindale estimates that the Mati Ke's Country extended over some 150 square miles. (400 sq. km.) running along and 20 miles in from the coast north of Port Keats including Tree Point,and the area south of the Moyle River swamplands. [4]
The clan, constituted by two 'hordes', [4] and totem system was described by the Norwegian ethnologist Johannes Falkenberg in 1962, based on fieldwork conducted in 1950. [5] [6]
The Mati Ke were one of several tribes living south of Wadeye between the Moyle and Fitzmaurice rivers. Many moved to Wadeye when a Catholic mission was set up there in the 1930s. Most descendants of the tribe dropped using their Mati Ke speech and adopted the majority language in the area, Murrinh-Patha, which is spoken by about 2500 people and serves as a lingua franca for several other ethnic groups.