In 1898, the aboriginal population of the Princess Charlotte Bay numbered around 1,000. However, white settlement of the region caused them to lose almost all of their traditional lands. The many Aboriginal groups of the region were forcibly moved to missions and were exposed to diseases like syphilis and Spanish influenza. This resulted in the Aboriginal population of the region declining by 90% from 1898 levels. In the 1930s many of the surviving Aboriginal people were moved to the Old Lockhart Mission. Those Aboriginal people who remained in their territory were from the Morrobalama, Lamalama, and Umbindhamu tribes, and lived there until 1961. During that time, most of the Aboriginal people worked on local cattle stations or were killed by mounted police. In 1961 the Aboriginal people who had remained on their lands were moved to the tip of the Cape York Peninsula. By the 1990s, the total number of speakers was reduced to four elderly speakers. Only two of those speakers, Nancy Gunnawarra and Mabel Kullakulla, spoke the language on a regular basis. Most younger people of the community could understand the language but were unable to speak it.
Unusually for an Australian language, Umbuygamu has a relatively large consonantal inventory, including fricatives, prestopped consonants, and other consonants not normally found in Aboriginal languages. In this table, the orthographic symbols are bolded where they differ from IPA orthography.
Personal pronouns have two cases: nominative for intransitive and transitive subjects, and accusative for transitive objects. Nouns have an ergative case for transitive subject function and an absolutive case for intransitive subject and transitive object function. There are a total of at least 10 noun cases, and the case-marking suffix is dependent on the final consonant in the root word. The absolutive case is the only case suffix that is not final consonant-dependent, and has a zero as a suffix. atha -Ø la-ngan fire-ABS burn - 3sg0 "The fire is burning now." Pronouns are attached to the end of the verb as a suffix, either as nominal or possessive.
