Australian Aboriginal languages


Australian Aboriginal languages are those languages spoken by Australian Aboriginal people. There are more than 250 distinct languages.
Australian languages have historically been classified into numerous language families. The largest single language family is the Pama-Nyungan family, which covers approximately seven eighths of the continent; the remaining languages sometimes called "non-Pama-Nyungan" as a term of convenience, are clustered together in the north-west, and have been classified into over twenty separate families.
Despite the diversity of Australian languages, many linguists have considered for decades that most languages of the Australian continent, including Pama-Nyungan, are members of one higher-level family. A proto-language, Proto-Australian, was reconstructed for the first time in 2024. Proto-Australian is dated to approximately 6,000 years before the present, much later than human habitation of Australia; how it spread across the continent, replacing earlier languages, is as yet unclear.
There have always been some Australian languages excluded from larger groupings as language isolates; currently, Tiwi and the Tasmanian languages are considered unrelated to Proto-Australian.
Of the languages of the Torres Strait, Kala Lagaw Ya is a Pama-Nyungan language, while Meriam Mer is a Papuan language.
At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remained in daily use, with the majority being highly endangered. In 2020, 90 per cent of the barely more than 100 languages still spoken are considered endangered. Thirteen languages are still being acquired by children. 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.
In 2026 the most widely-spoken languages by Australian Aboriginal people are those whose origins post-date the colonisation of Australia; these languages include Australian Kriol, Australian Aboriginal English, and Light Warlpiri.

Number of languages

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 up to possibly 363. The Indigenous languages of Australia

Living Aboriginal languages

At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remained in daily use, with the majority being highly endangered. In 2020, 90 per cent of the barely more than 100 languages still spoken are considered endangered. Thirteen languages are still being acquired by children. 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. Some Indigenous communities and linguists show support for learning programmes either for language revival proper or for only "post-vernacular maintenance".
File:Aboriginal languages by LGA.svg|250px|right|thumb|Percentage of people in each local government area of the Northern Territory who speak an Aboriginal language at home, according to the 2021 census:
The National Indigenous Languages Survey is a regular Australia-wide survey of the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages conducted in 2005, 2014 and 2019.
Languages with more than 100 speakers:
Total 47 languages, 42,300 speakers, with 11 having only approximately 100. 11 languages have over 1,000 speakers.
  • Creoles:
  • * Kriol

    Classification

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.
However, few other linguists accept Dixon's thesis. For example, Kenneth L. Hale describes Dixon's scepticism 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". 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 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. In 2024, Harvey and Mailhammer published a book-length reconstruction of Proto-Australian.

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. 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 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.

Families

''Glottolog'' 4.1 (2019)

Glottolog 4.1 recognises 23 independent families and 9 isolates in Australia, comprising a total of 32 independent language groups.
;Families
  • Pama-Nyungan
  • Gunwinyguan
  • Western Daly
  • Nyulnyulan
  • Worrorran
  • Mirndi
  • Iwaidjan Proper
  • Mangarrayi-Maran
  • Maningrida
  • Tangkic
  • Giimbiyu
  • Jarrakan
  • Yangmanic
  • Bunaban
  • Eastern Daly
  • Northern Daly
  • Southern Daly
  • Garrwan
  • Limilngan-Wulna
  • Marrku-Wurrugu
  • North-Eastern Tasmanian
  • South-Eastern Tasmanian
  • Western Tasmanian
;Isolates
  • Gaagudju
  • Kungarakany
  • Laragia
  • Minkin
  • Oyster Bay-Big River-Little Swanport
  • Tiwi
  • Umbugarla
  • Wadjiginy
  • Wageman

    Bowern (2011)

According to Claire Bowern's Australian Languages, Australian languages divide into approximately 30 primary sub-groups and 5 isolates.
In 1962, Arthur Capell gave his assessment of the origins and internal grouping of Aboriginal languages. He referred to many attempts having been made to link the Australian languages to other parts of the world, including the Dravidian languages of South India, those of the Andaman Islands, and African languages. "All must be regarded as failures. In fact, it seems quite possible to explain the multiple forms of languages in Australia on the basis of a single original."
Capell proposed 5 main groupings as clear at the time, referring to earlier classifications by Schmidt and Kroeber :
  1. Prefixing languages
  2. Western Desert Languages
  3. Aranda
  4. Victoria with New South Wales south coastal region
  5. Unclassified groups occupying the bulk of Queensland and New South Wales.
In 1967 Carl Georg von Brandenstein claimed that he had isolated and identified some sixty Portuguese language loanwords in several indigenous languages of Australia's far north. Australian linguists have generally dismissed these conclusions, except perhaps for the word tartaruga. Nick Thieberger, a Melbourne University linguist, argues that Brandenstein's approach was still strongly influenced by outdated nineteenth-century linguistic thinking.