Australian Aboriginal languages

The primary typological division in Australian languages: Pama–Nyungan languages (tan) and non-Pama–Nyungan languages (mustard and grey).

People who speak Australian Aboriginal languages as a percentage of the population in Australia, divided geographically by statistical local area at the 2011 census

The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250^[1] (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intelligible varieties) up to possibly 363.^[2] The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands.^[3] The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings. Despite this uncertainty, the Indigenous Australian languages are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages",^[4] or the "Australian family".^[a]

The term can include both Tasmanian languages and the Western Torres Strait language,^[6] but the genetic relationship to the mainland Australian languages of the former is unknown,^[7] while that of the latter is Pama–Nyungan, though it shares features with the neighbouring Papuan, Eastern Trans-Fly languages, in particular Meriam Mir of the Torres Strait Islands, as well as the Papuan Tip Austronesian languages.^[8] Most Australian languages belong to the widespread Pama–Nyungan family, while the remainder are classified as "non-Pama–Nyungan", which is a term of convenience that does not imply a genealogical relationship.

In the late 18th century, there were more than 250 distinct First Nations Peoples social groupings and a similar number of languages or varieties.^[6] The status and knowledge of Aboriginal languages today varies greatly. Many languages became extinct with settlement as the encroachment of colonial society broke up Indigenous cultures. For some of these languages, few records exist for vocabulary and grammar. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remain in daily use,^[9] with the majority being highly endangered. In 2020, 90 per cent of the barely more than 100 languages still spoken are considered endangered.^[10] 13 languages are still being transmitted to children.^[11] The surviving languages are located in the most isolated areas. Of the five least endangered Western Australian Aboriginal languages, four belong to the Western Desert grouping of the Central and Great Victoria Desert.

Yolŋu languages from north-east Arnhem Land are also currently learned by children. Bilingual education is being used successfully in some communities. Seven of the most widely spoken Australian languages, such as Warlpiri, Murrinh-patha and Tiwi, retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers.^[12] Some Indigenous communities and linguists show support for learning programmes either for language revival proper or for only "post-vernacular maintenance" (Indigenous communities having the opportunity to learn some words and concepts related to the lost language).^[13]

Living Aboriginal languages[]

The National Indigenous Languages Report is a regular Australia-wide survey of the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages^[14] conducted in 2005,^[15] 2014^[16] and 2019.^[14]

Languages with more than 100 speakers:

• New South Wales:
  • 3 languages (~ 600):
    • Yugambeh-Bundjalung
      • Bundjalung (~ 100)
      • Yugambeh (~ 20; shared with Queensland)
      • Githabul (~ 10; shared with Queensland)
    • Wiradjuri (~ 500)
    • Gamilaraay (~ 100)
• Victoria:
  • N/A
• Tasmania:
  • N/A
• South Australia:
  • 4 languages (~ 3,900):
    • Ngarrindjeri (~ 300)
    • Adyamathanha (~ 100)
    • Yankunytjatjara (~ 400)
    • Pitjantjatjara (~ 3,100; shared with Northern Territory and Western Australia)
• Queensland:
  • 5 languages (~ 1,800):
    • Kuku Yalanji (~ 300)
    • Guugu Yimidhirr (~ 800)
    • Kuuk Thaayore (~ 300)
    • Wik Mungkan (~ 400)
• Western Australia:
  • 17 languages (~ 8,000):
    • Noongar (~ 500)
    • Wangkatha (~ 300)
    • Ngaanyatjarra (~ 1,000)
    • Manytjilyitjarra (~ 100)
    • Martu Wangka (~ 700)
    • Panyjima (~ 100)
    • Yinjibarndi (~ 400)
    • Nyangumarta (~ 200)
    • Bardi (~ 400)
    • Wajarri (~ 100)
    • Pintupi (~ 100; shared with Northern Territory)
    • Pitjantjatjara (~3,100; shared with Northern Territory and South Australia)
    • Kukatja (~ 100)
    • Walmatjarri (~ 300)
    • Gooniyandi (~ 100)
    • Djaru (~ 200)
    • Kija (~ 200)
    • Miriwoong (~ 200)
• Northern Territory:
  • 19 languages (~ 28,100):
    • Luritja (~ 1,000)
    • Upper Arrernte (~ 4,500)
    • Warlpiri (~ 2,300)
    • Kaytetye (~ 100)
    • Warumungu (~ 300)
    • Gurindji (~ 400)
    • Murrinh Patha (~ 2,000)
    • Tiwi (~ 2,000)
    • Pintupi (~ 100; shared with Western Australia)
    • Pitjantjatjara (~3,100; shared with Western Australia and South Australia)
    • Iwaidja (~ 100)
    • Maung (~ 400)
    • Kunwinjku (~ 1,800)
    • Burarra (~ 1,000)
    • Dhuwal (~4,200)
    • Djinang (~ 100)
    • Nunggubuyu (~ 300)
    • Anindilyakwa (~ 1,500)

Total 46 languages, 42,300 speakers, with 11 having only approximately 100. 11 languages have over 1,000 speakers.

• Creoles:
  • Kriol (~ 20,000)

Classification[]

Australian language families. From west to east:

  Nyulnyulan

  Worrorran

  Bunuban

  Jarrakan

  Mindi (2 areas)

  Daly (4 families)

  Wagiman

  Wardaman

  Tiwi (offshore)

  Darwin Region

  Iwaidjan

  Giimbiyu

  Arnhem, incl. Gunwinyguan

  Garawan and Tangkic

  Pama–Nyungan (3 areas)

Internal[]

Most Australian languages are commonly held to belong to the Pama–Nyungan family, a family accepted by most linguists, with Robert M. W. Dixon as a notable exception. For convenience, the rest of the languages, all spoken in the far north, are commonly lumped together as "Non-Pama–Nyungan", although this does not necessarily imply that they constitute a valid clade. Dixon argues that after perhaps 40,000 years of mutual influence, it is no longer possible to distinguish deep genealogical relationships from areal features in Australia, and that not even Pama–Nyungan is a valid language family.^[17]

However, few other linguists accept Dixon's thesis. For example, Kenneth L. Hale describes Dixon's skepticism as an erroneous phylogenetic assessment which is "such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte".^[18] Hale provides pronominal and grammatical evidence (with suppletion) as well as more than fifty basic-vocabulary cognates (showing regular sound correspondences) between the proto-Northern-and-Middle Pamic (pNMP) family of the Cape York Peninsula on the Australian northeast coast and proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) apart, to support the Pama–Nyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that of Proto-Indo-European.

Johanna Nichols suggests that the northern families may be relatively recent arrivals from Maritime Southeast Asia, perhaps later replaced there by the spread of Austronesian. That could explain the typological difference between Pama–Nyungan and non-Pama–Nyungan languages, but not how a single family came to be so widespread. Nicholas Evans suggests that the Pama–Nyungan family spread along with the now-dominant Aboriginal culture that includes the Australian Aboriginal kinship system.

In late 2017, Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer published a study in Diachronica that hypothesised, by analysing noun class prefix paradigms across both Pama-Nyungan and the minority non-Pama-Nyungan languages, that a Proto-Australian could be reconstructed from which all known Australian languages descend. This Proto-Australian language, they concluded, would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago in northern Australia.^[19][20][21]

External[]

For a long time unsuccessful attempts were made to detect a link between Australian and Papuan languages, the latter being represented by those spoken on the coastal areas of New Guinea facing the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea.^[22] In 1986 William A. Foley noted lexical similarities between Robert M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the East New Guinea Highlands languages. He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass (called the Sahul continent) for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. Dixon, in the meantime, later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal.^[23]

Families[]

Glottolog 4.1 (2019)[]

Glottolog 4.1 (2019) recognizes 23 independent families and 9 isolates in Australia, comprising a total of 32 independent language groups.^[24]

Bowern (2011)[]

According to Claire Bowern's Australian Languages (2011), Australian languages divide into approximately 30 primary sub-groups and 5 isolates.^[2]

• Presumptive isolates:
  • Tiwi
  • Giimbiyu (extinct)
  • Marrgu (extinct)
  • Wagiman (moribund)
  • Wardaman
• Previously established families:
  • Bunuban (2)
  • Daly (four to five families, with 11–19 languages)
  • Iwaidjan (3–7)
  • Jarrakan (3–5)
  • Nyulnyulan (8)
  • Worrorran (7–12)
• Newly proposed families:
  • Mirndi (5–7)
  • Darwin Region (4)
  • Macro-Gunwinyguan languages (22)
  • Greater Pama–Nyungan:
    • Tangkic (5)
    • Garawan (3)
    • Pama–Nyungan proper (approximately 270 languages)
  • Western and Northern Tasmanian (extinct)
  • Northeastern Tasmanian (extinct)
  • Eastern Tasmanian (extinct)

Survival[]

It has been inferred from the probable number of languages and the estimate of pre-contact population levels that there may have been from 3,000 to 4,000 speakers on average for each of the 250 languages.^[25] A number of these languages were almost immediately wiped out within decades of colonisation, the case of the Aboriginal Tasmanians being one notorious example of precipitous linguistic ethnocide. Tasmania had been separated from the mainland at the end of the Quaternary glaciation, and Indigenous Tasmanians remained isolated from the outside world for around 12,000 years. Claire Bowern has concluded in a recent study that there were twelve Tasmanian languages, and that those languages are unrelated (that is, not demonstrably related) to those on the Australian mainland.^[26]

In 1990 it was estimated that 90 languages still survived of the approximately 250 once spoken, but with a high rate of attrition as elders died out. Of the 90, 70% by 2001 were judged as 'severely endangered' with only 17 spoken by all age groups, a definition of a 'strong' language.^[27] On these grounds it is anticipated that despite efforts at linguistic preservation, many of the remaining languages will disappear within the next generation. The overall trend suggests that in the not too distant future all of the Indigenous languages will be lost, perhaps by 2050,^[28] and with them the cultural knowledge they convey.^[29]

During the period of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in institutions where they were punished for speaking their Indigenous language. Different, mutually unintelligible language groups were often mixed together, with Australian Aboriginal English or Australian Kriol language as the only lingua franca. The result was a disruption to the inter-generational transmission of these languages that severely impacted their future use. Today, that same transmission of language between parents and grandparents to their children is a key mechanism for reversing language shift.^[30] For children, proficiency in the language of their cultural heritage has a positive influence on their ethnic identity formation,^{[citation needed]} and it is thought to be of particular benefit to the emotional well-being of Indigenous children. There is some evidence to suggest that the reversal of the Indigenous language shift may lead to decreased self-harm and suicide rates among Indigenous youth.^[31]

The first Aboriginal people to use Australian Aboriginal languages in the Australian parliament were Aden Ridgeway on 25 August 1999 in the Senate when he said "On this special occasion, I make my presence known as an Aborigine and to this chamber I say, perhaps for the first time: Nyandi baaliga Jaingatti. Nyandi mimiga Gumbayynggir. Nya jawgar yaam Gumbyynggir."^[32] and in the House of Representatives on 31 August 2016 Linda Burney gave an acknowledgment of country in Wiradjuri in her first speech^[33] and was sung in by Lynette Riley in Wiradjuri from the public gallery.^[34]

Preservation measures[]

2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019), as declared by the United Nations General Assembly. The commemoration was used to raise awareness of and support for the preservation of Aboriginal languages within Australia, including spreading knowledge about the importance of each language to the identity and knowledge of Indigenous groups. Warrgamay/Girramay man Troy Wyles-Whelan joined the North Queensland Regional Aboriginal Corporation Language Centre (NQRACLC) in 2008, and has been contributing oral histories and the results of his own research to their database.^[35] As part of the efforts to raise awareness of Wiradjuri language a Grammar of Wiradjuri language^[36] was published in 2014 and A new Wiradjuri dictionary^[37] in 2010.^[38]

The New South Wales Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 became law on 24 October 2017.^[39] It was the first legislation in Australia to acknowledge the significance of first languages.^[40]

In 2019 the Royal Australian Mint issued a 50-cent coin to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages which features 14 different words for "money" from Australian Indigenous languages.^[41][42] The coin was designed by Aleksandra Stokic in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups.^[42]

The collaborative work of digitising and transcribing many word lists created by ethnographer Daisy Bates in the 1900s at Daisy Bates Online^[43] provides a valuable resource for those researching especially Western Australian languages, and some languages of the Northern Territory and South Australia.^[44] The project is co-ordinated by Nick Thieburger, who works in collaboration with the National Library of Australia "to have all the microfilmed images from Section XII of the Bates papers digitised", and the project is ongoing.^[45]

Language revival[]

In recent decades, there have been attempts to revive indigenous languages.^[46] Significant challenges exist however for the revival of languages in the dominant English language culture of Australia.^[47]

The Kaurna language, spoken by the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, has been the subject of a concerted revival movement since the 1980s, coordinated by Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, a unit working out of the University of Adelaide.^[48] The language had rapidly disappeared after the settlement of South Australia and the breaking up of local indigenous people. Ivaritji, the last known speaker of the language, died in 1931. However, a substantial number of primary source records existed for the language, from which the language was reconstructed.^[47]

Common features[]

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"Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name."^[49]:212

Whether it is due to genetic unity or some other factor such as occasional contact, typologically the Australian languages form a language area or Sprachbund, sharing much of their vocabulary and many distinctive phonological features across the entire continent.

A common feature of many Australian languages is that they display so-called avoidance speech, special speech registers used only in the presence of certain close relatives. These registers share the phonology and grammar of the standard language, but the lexicon is different and usually very restricted. There are also commonly speech taboos during extended periods of mourning or initiation that have led to numerous Aboriginal sign languages.

For morphosyntactic alignment, many Australian languages have ergative–absolutive case systems. These are typically split systems; a widespread pattern is for pronouns (or first and second persons) to have nominative–accusative case marking and for third person to be ergative–absolutive, though splits between animate and inanimate are also found. In some languages the persons in between the accusative and ergative inflections (such as second person, or third-person human) may be tripartite: that is, marked overtly as either ergative or accusative in transitive clauses, but not marked as either in intransitive clauses. There are also a few languages which employ only nominative–accusative case marking.^{[citation needed]}

Phonetics and phonology[]

Segmental inventory[]

A typical Australian phonological inventory includes just three vowels, usually /i, u, a/, which may occur in both long and short variants. In a few cases the [u] has been unrounded to give [i, ɯ, a].

There is almost never a voicing contrast; that is, a consonant may sound like a [p] at the beginning of a word, but like a [b] between vowels, and either letter could be (and often is) chosen to represent it. Australia also stands out as being almost entirely free of fricative consonants, even of [h]. In the few cases where fricatives do occur, they developed recently through the lenition (weakening) of stops, and are therefore non-sibilants like [ð] rather than the sibilants like [s] that are common elsewhere in the world. Some languages also have three rhotics, typically a flap, a trill, and an approximant (that is, like the combined rhotics of English and Spanish) and many have four laterals.

Besides the lack of fricatives, the most striking feature of Australian speech sounds is the large number of places of articulation. Nearly every language has four places in the coronal region, either phonemically or allophonically. This is accomplished through two variables: the position of the tongue (front or back), and its shape (pointed or flat). There are also bilabial, velar and often palatal consonants, but a complete absence of uvular consonants and only a few languages with a glottal stop. Both stops and nasals occur at all six places, and in some languages laterals occur at all four coronal places.

A language which displays the full range of stops, nasals and laterals is Kalkatungu, which has labial p, m; "dental" th, nh, lh; "alveolar" t, n, l; "retroflex" rt, rn, rl; "palatal" ty, ny, ly; and velar k, ng. Wangganguru has all this, as well as three rhotics. Yanyuwa has even more contrasts, with an additional true dorso-palatal series, plus prenasalised consonants at all seven places of articulation, in addition to all four laterals.

A notable exception to the above generalisations is Kalaw Lagaw Ya, which has an inventory more like its Papuan neighbours than the languages of the Australian mainland, including full voice contrasts: /p b/, dental /t̪ d̪/, alveolar /t d/, the sibilants /s z/ (which have allophonic variation with [tʃ] and [dʒ] respectively) and velar /k ɡ/, as well as only one rhotic, one lateral and three nasals (labial, dental and velar) in contrast to the 5 places of articulation of stops/sibilants. Where vowels are concerned, it has 8 vowels with some morpho-syntactic as well as phonemic length contrasts (i iː, e eː, a aː, ə əː, ɔ ɔː, o oː, ʊ ʊː, u uː), and glides that distinguish between those that are in origin vowels, and those that in origin are consonants. Kunjen and other neighbouring languages have also developed contrasting aspirated consonants ([pʰ], [t̪ʰ], [tʰ], [cʰ], [kʰ]) not found further south.

Coronal consonants[]

Descriptions of the coronal articulations can be inconsistent.

The alveolar series t, n, l (or d, n, l) is straightforward: across the continent, these sounds are alveolar (that is, pronounced by touching the tongue to the ridge just behind the gum line of the upper teeth) and apical (that is, touching that ridge with the tip of the tongue). This is very similar to English t, d, n, l, though the Australian t is not aspirated, even in Kalaw Lagaw Ya, despite its other stops being aspirated.

The other apical series is the retroflex, rt, rn, rl (or rd, rn, rl). Here the place is further back in the mouth, in the postalveolar or prepalatal region. The articulation is actually most commonly subapical; that is, the tongue curls back so that the underside of the tip makes contact. That is, they are true retroflex consonants. It has been suggested that subapical pronunciation is characteristic of more careful speech, while these sounds tend to be apical in rapid speech. Kalaw Lagaw Ya and many other languages in North Queensland differ from most other Australian languages in not having a retroflexive series.

The dental series th, nh, lh are always laminal (that is, pronounced by touching with the surface of the tongue just above the tip, called the blade of the tongue), but may be formed in one of three different ways, depending on the language, on the speaker, and on how carefully the speaker pronounces the sound. These are interdental with the tip of the tongue visible between the teeth, as in th in English; dental with the tip of the tongue down behind the lower teeth, so that the blade is visible between the teeth; and denti-alveolar, that is, with both the tip and the blade making contact with the back of the upper teeth and alveolar ridge, as in French t, d, n, l. The first tends to be used in careful enunciation, and the last in more rapid speech, while the tongue-down articulation is less common.

Finally, the palatal series ty, ny, ly. (The stop is often spelled dj, tj, or j.) Here the contact is also laminal, but further back, spanning the alveolar to postalveolar, or the postalveolar to prepalatal regions. The tip of the tongue is typically down behind the lower teeth. This is similar to the "closed" articulation of Circassian fricatives (see Postalveolar consonant). The body of the tongue is raised towards the palate. This is similar to the "domed" English postalveolar fricative sh. Because the tongue is "peeled" from the roof of the mouth from back to front during the release of these stops, there is a fair amount of frication, giving the ty something of the impression of the English palato-alveolar affricate ch or the Polish alveolo-palatal affricate ć. That is, these consonants are not palatal in the IPA sense of the term, and indeed they contrast with true palatals in Yanyuwa. In Kalaw Lagaw Ya, the palatal consonants are sub-phonemes of the alveolar sibilants /s/ and /z/.

These descriptions do not apply exactly to all Australian languages, as the notes regarding Kalaw Lagaw Ya demonstrate. However, they do describe most of them, and are the expected norm against which languages are compared.

Orthography[]

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.

Demographics (2016)[]

Place	Population that speaks an Indigenous language	Percentage that speaks an Indigenous language
Torres Strait Islands	3,159	69.9%
Northern Territory	34,956	15%
Western Australia	10,251	0.4%
Queensland	13,474	0.3%
South Australia	3,392	0.2%
New South Wales	1,922	0%
Victoria	526	0%
Australian Capital Territory	132	0%
Tasmania	70	0%

Notable linguists[]

A number of linguists and ethnographers have contributed greatly to the sum of knowledge about Australian languages. Of particular note are:

See also[]

• Aboriginal Australians
• Australian Aboriginal sign languages
• List of Aboriginal Australian group names
• List of Australian Aboriginal languages
• List of Aboriginal languages of New South Wales
• List of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin
• List of endangered languages with mobile apps
• List of reduplicated Australian place names
• Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
• Macro-Gunwinyguan languages
• Macro-Pama–Nyungan languages

Notes[]

Citations[]

Sources[]

Further reading[]

• Simpson, Jane (21 January 2019). "The state of Australia's Indigenous languages – and how we can help people speak them more often". The Conversation.
• AUSTLANG Australian Indigenous Languages Database at AIATSIS
• Aboriginal Australia map, a guide to Aboriginal language, tribal and nation groups published by AIATSIS
• Aboriginal Languages of Australia
• The AIATSIS map of Aboriginal Australia (recorded ranges; full view here
• Languages of Australia, as listed by Ethnologue
• Report of the Second National Indigenous Languages Survey 2014
• Finding the meaning of an Aboriginal word
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Social Justice Report 2009 for more information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and policy.
• Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages (Northern Territory languages only)
• Bowern, Claire. 2016. "Chirila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia". Language Documentation and Conservation 10 (2016): 1–44. http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/?p=1002.

External links[]

• CHIRILA: A database of the languages of Australia Archived 23 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine (Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia)
• CHIRILA, Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab