The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise up to 27 language families and
isolates, spoken by the Aboriginal people of the Australian mainland and a
few nearby islands. The relationships between these languages are not clear at
present. Despite this uncertainty the indigenous languages of Australia are
collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages". By
convention these do not include the languages of Tasmania or the eastern
Torres Strait language Meriam Mer. In the late 18th century, there were
between 350 and 750 distinct Aboriginal social groupings, and a similar number
of languages or dialects. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150
Indigenous languages remain in daily use, and all except roughly 20 are
highly endangered. Of those that survive, only 10% are being learned by
children and those languages are usually located in the most isolated areas. For
example, of the 5 least endangered Western Australian Aboriginal languages,
4 belong to the Ngaanyatjarra 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 and Tiwi, retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers. Some Aboriginal
communities and linguists show support for learning programs either for
language revival proper or for only "post-vernacular maintenance".
The Tasmanian people were nearly eradicated early in Australia's colonial
history, and their languages were lost before much was recorded. Tasmania was
separated from the mainland at the end of the last ice age, and Tasmanian
Aboriginal people apparently remained isolated from the outside world for
around 10,000 years. Too little is known of their languages for classification,
though they seem to have had phonological similarities with languages
of the mainlandthese Common features
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
mother-in-law languages, 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 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 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.
= Phonetics and phonology = Segmental inventory
A typical Australian phonological inventory includes just three vowels,
usually [a, i, u], which may occur in both long and short variants. In a few
cases the [u] has been unrounded to give [a, i, ɯ].
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 symbol could be chosen to represent it. Australia also stands out
as being almost entirely free of fricatives, even of [h]. In the few
cases where fricatives do occur, they developed recently through the lenition
of stops, and are therefore non-sibilants like [ð] rather than
sibilants like [s] which 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 R's of English and Spanish.
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,
and its shape. There are also bilabial, velar and often palatal consonants, but
a complete absence of uvular or glottal consonants. Both plosives 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 and laterals is Kalkutungu, 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. Wangkangurru has all this, as well as three rhotics. Yanyuwa has even
more contrasts, with an additional true dorso-palatal series, plus prenasalized
stops at all seven places of articulation, in addition to all four
laterals. A notable exception to the above
generalizations is Kala 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/ and
velar /k ɡ/, as well as only one rhotic, one lateral and three nasals 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, 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 plosives
not found further south. Coronal consonants
Descriptions of the coronal articulations can be inconsistent.
The alveolar series t, n, l is straightforward: across the continent,
these sounds are alveolar and apical. This is very similar to English t, d, n,
l, though the Australian t is not aspirated, even in Kala Lagaw Ya,
despite its other stops being aspirated. The other apical series is the
retroflex, rt, rn, rl. Here the place is further back in the mouth, in the
postalveolar or prepalatal region. The articulation is actually most commonly
sub-apical; 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 sub-apical pronunciation is characteristic of more careful
speech, while these sounds tend to be apical in rapid speech. Kala 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, 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.
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 some Circassian fricatives. 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 Kala Lagaw Ya,
the palatal consonants are sub-phonemes of the alveolar sibilants and .
These descriptions do not apply exactly to all Australian languages, as the
notes regarding Kala 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.
Classification = Internal =
Most Australian languages are commonly held to belong to the Pama–Nyungan
family, a family accepted by most linguists, with R. 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
. However, few other linguists, Australian or otherwise, accept Dixon's
thesis. Kenneth L. Hale describes Dixon's skepticism as an "extravagantly
and spectacularly erroneous" and "wrong-headed" phylogenetic assessment
which is "so bizarrely faulted, and such an insult to the eminently successful
practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it
positively demands a decisive riposte." In the same paper, Hale provides
pronominal and grammatical evidence as well as more than fifty basic-vocabulary
cognates between the proto-Northern-and-Middle Pamic family
of the Cape York Peninsula on the Australian northeast coast and
proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 km apart, to support
the Pama–Nyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that of Proto-Indo-European.
It is often noted that it is odd for one family to dominate so much of a
continent when the speakers are not agricultural and have no technological
advantage over their neighbours. 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. Evans suggests that the Pama–Nyungan family spread along with
the now-dominant Aboriginal culture that includes the moiety kinship system.
Dixon of course believes that the languages are not related, but merely a
long-standing Sprachbund. = External =
It has been suggested that most or all Australian languages have a relationship
with the Trans–New Guinea family or the Sepik–Ramu languages. Neither of these
conclusions is currently widely accepted. William A. Foley noted lexical
similarities between R. M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian
and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands. 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 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. However,
Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal and thus more
research into the area is needed before drawing conclusions.
= Families = Australian languages divide into a dozen
or so families. Note when cross-referencing that most language
names have multiple spellings: rr=r, b=p, d=t, g=k, dj=j=tj=c, j=y, y=i, w=u,
u=oo, e=a, and so on. A range is given for the number of languages in each
family, as sources count languages differently.
Presumptive isolates: Tiwi
Giimbiyu Marrgu
Wagiman Previously established families:
Bunaban Daly
Iwaidjan Jarrakan
Nyulnyulan Wororan
Newly proposed families: Mirndi
Darwin Region Arnhem macrofamily, including
Gunwinyguan Greater Pama–Nyungan:
Tangkic the Garawa
Pama–Nyungan proper Western and Northern Tasmanian
Northeastern Tasmanian Eastern Tasmanian
See also Australian Aboriginal sign languages
Gunwinyguan languages Australian Aborigines
List of Indigenous Australian group names
List of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin
Macro-Pama–Nyungan languages Southwest Pama–Nyungan languages
List of reduplicated Australian place names
References Notes
Bibliography Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages.
Bloomsbury Publishing plc. p. 43. ISBN 0-7475-3117-X.
Dixon, R. M. W. 1989. Searching for Aboriginal Languages. University of
Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0-226-15430-0 Dixon, R. M. W. 2002. Australian
Languages: Their Nature and Development. Evans, Nicholas. 2003. The
non-Pama–Nyungan languages of northern Australia: comparative studies of the
continent's most linguistically complex region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
McConvell, Patrick and Nicholas Evans. 1997. Archaeology and Linguistics:
Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University
Press McConvell, Patrick and Thieberger,
Nicholas. 2001. State of Indigenous languages in Australia - 2001, Australia
State of the Environment Second Technical Paper Series, Department of
the Environment and Heritage, Canberra. O'Grady, Geoff; Ken Hale. 2004. The
Coherence and Distinctiveness of the Pama–Nyungan Language Family within the
Australian Linguistic Phylum. In Claire Bowern and Harold Koch, eds., Australian
Languages: Classification and the Comparative Method. John Benjamins Pub.
Co. UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s
Languages in Danger Walsh, Michael. 1991. Overview of
Indigenous languages of Australia. In Suzane Romaine, Language in Australia.
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33983-9
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad, "Aboriginal languages deserve revival", The
Australian Higher Education, 26 August 2009.
External links AUSTLANG Australian Indigenous Languages
Database at AIATSIS Aboriginal Australia map, a guide to
Aboriginal language, tribal and nation groups published by AIATSIS
Map of Indigenous Australian languages from Muturzikin.com
Australian languages plotted on Google Maps
Aboriginal Languages of Australia The Horton map of Australian Indigenous
languages (recorded ranges; full view here
Languages of Australia, as listed by Ethnologue
National Indigenous Languages Survey Report 2005 PDF format, size 2.6 MB
Accessed 16 February 2009 Report of the Second National Indigenous
Languages Survey 2014 Accessed 6 April 2014
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
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