Australian Aboriginal languages

Alternative Title: Australian languages

Australian Aboriginal languages, family of some 200 to 300 indigenous languages spoken in Australia and a few small offshore islands by approximately 50,000 people. Many of the languages are already extinct, and some are spoken by only dwindling numbers of elderly people, but a few are still vigorous. There is currently a resurgence of ethnic pride among Aboriginals, and government programs that assist Aboriginal peoples in maintaining their languages and becoming literate in them have sprung up. Evidence of this ethnic and linguistic pride can be seen in the preference of many indigenous Australians for the use of such self-designations as Koori (also spelled Koorie, meaning “person”) rather than the terms Aborigine and Aboriginal, which were imposed upon them (see Researcher’s Note: Aborigines and self-designation). Another linguistic trend is the use of a distinctive Aboriginal English (which might arguably be classified as a creole and is called Kriol) in some areas.

  • A discussion of the languages of indigenous Australians, including Aborigines.
    A discussion of the languages of indigenous Australians, including Aborigines.

Classification and distribution

Australian Aboriginal languages are a unique language group, having no generally accepted genetic connections with non-Australian languages. (Despite its name, the Austronesian language family does not include Australian Aboriginal languages.) This uniqueness is probably the result of geographic isolation: archaeological evidence indicates that Australia has been inhabited for at least 40,000 years, and there is little sign of influxes of new inhabitants or even of extensive cultural contact with other Pacific peoples (except locally in the Torres Strait Islands, which are between northern Queensland and Papua New Guinea). Although Australian languages have a fairly clear grammatical and phonological profile, the great length of time over which they developed makes reconstructing Proto-Australian challenging.

  • An overview of efforts to preserve Australian indigenous languages, especially Yawuru.
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Aboriginals traditionally lived by hunting and gathering and were seasonally mobile, but, because each local clan was deeply attached to certain local sites of ritual importance, permanent population movements seem to have been gradual. The linguistic map of Australia reflects stepwise migrations rather than rapid military conquests and imperial expansions like those that established the linguistic landscapes of other continents. Language boundaries were marginal or irrelevant to political organization and were crosscut by kinship and marriage networks. In thinly populated areas, such as the Western Desert, chains of closely related dialects were spread over a wide area; in the more densely populated coastal and subcoastal areas, language boundaries were generally sharp, but multilingualism was common.

Estimates of the number of distinct Aboriginal languages at the time of European contact range from 200 to 300. A precise count is difficult, not only because of the problem of distinguishing dialects from languages but because many speech varieties became extinct before they could be systematically recorded, and they are known—if at all—from fragmentary and badly transcribed missionary word lists. A major collective effort to record the surviving languages began in the early 1970s, and fairly complete grammars or grammatical sketches of perhaps 100 languages are now available.

Most specialists agree that the languages of continental Australia are a genetic group. In the Torres Strait Islands one of the two languages is genetically Australian while the other is Papuan. Other languages, such as Tiwi and Anindilyakwa, spoken on small offshore islands, clearly belong to the Australian family. The language or languages of Tasmania were not extensively studied before their extinction; the meagre surviving lists of Tasmanian words show the characteristic Australian sound system, but the words themselves do not form demonstrable cognate sets with continental languages.

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The major issue in the internal subgrouping of Australian languages is the relationship between the Pama-Nyungan group, which covers 90 percent of the continent, and the residual non-Pama-Nyungan cluster, which stretches across northernmost Australia (except Queensland). The Yuulngu group is a separate Pama-Nyungan enclave, isolated from the main block by intervening non-Pama-Nyungan languages, as indicated on the map. In classifications published between 1950 and 1975, Pama-Nyungan was identified as a genetic subfamily; but the remaining languages were divided into some 25 to 30 subfamilies, some with just a single language, each descending separately from Proto-Australian. As new data have become available, it has become clear that many (and possibly all) of these northern subfamilies are more closely related to each other than to Pama-Nyungan, and scholars now seriously entertain the possibility that non-Pama-Nyungan is a genuine genetic entity. Personal pronouns in particular seem to differentiate the two divisions, a feature that has been used to revise the eastern boundary of non-Pama-Nyungan.

Among the most convincing cognates linking Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan are a small set of monosyllabic verb stems that appear to be derived from a common element in an older language. In languages of both groups, these verbs have characteristic affixes: either single consonants, which are known as consonantal augments (as when *bu- ‘hit, kill’ becomes *bu-m); case suffixes, such as the dative case marker *-ku and the accusative case marker *-n(a); and personal pronouns, such as first person singular *ŋay. (In the examples given, the asterisk marks a form that is reconstructed as having existed in Proto-Australian.)

Linguistic characteristics


Australian languages are of interest to general linguistics because of their unusual grammatical structures. An obvious feature of many of the languages is free word order, which contrasts dramatically with the syntactically regulated ordering of words and phrases in English and many other languages. Syntactic coherence is not created by word order but by inflection of verbs (changes in word form that mark grammatical categories such as tense) and case marking on nouns. In Pama-Nyungan languages, for example, the words meaning man (ergative) + see (past tense) + you (accusative) + big (ergative) can be placed in any word order whatever; they will be understood to mean “(A/The) big man saw you.” In most non-Pama-Nyungan languages, subject and object pronominals (as well as the usual categories of tense, aspect, and mood) are marked in verbal inflection, and some languages (such as Nunggubuyu) make little use of case marking on nouns. In this case the sentence “A big man saw you” would be rendered man + he-you-see (past tense) + big in any of several possible orders. In extreme free-word-order languages it is doubtful that phrases of more than one word (noun phrase, prepositional phrase, verb phrase, clause, sentence) are syntactically well-defined. Accordingly, word classes such as adjective and preposition, which presuppose the existence of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase, are of equally doubtful validity. Moreover, negatives and quantifiers (i.e., such words as all and every), which in English are logical operators that have scope over syntactically defined phrase structures, have no exact counterparts in languages without well-defined syntactic phrases; such languages must use other devices to express or imply similar concepts. As these features illustrate, research on these languages calls into question many core assumptions of linguistic theory.

Many Australian languages share a case system that attaches ergative suffixes to independent nouns and accusative suffixes to personal pronouns. Because word order does not indicate which noun is the subject of the transitive verb (as it does in English), the ergative suffix is used to denote the actor of the action referred to by the transitive verb. Thus, in the example man (ergative) + see (past tense) + you (accusative) + big (ergative), the ergative suffix indicates that man is the subject of the transitive verb see and that big modifies man and not the direct object, you. Intransitive subjects and transitive objects share another case, which is generally unmarked except that pronouns usually have an accusative form in direct object function. Pronominal markers on verbs tend to have more complex systems that are not easily labeled. Some linguists once argued that ergativity represented a “deep” grammatical feature of at least some Australian languages, such as Dyirbal, whose syntax could then be thought of as a kind of mirror image of the subject-object syntax of English and most other languages. (That is to say, direct objects in languages like Dyirbal have the special syntactic status that subjects have in English and most other languages.) The mirror-image model for these languages was controversial, however, and current research focuses on the more fundamental issues of phrase structure and logical semantics mentioned above.

Vocabulary and speech registers

A particularly interesting feature of Aboriginal languages is the influence of kinship on special speech registers. Kinship relations play an extremely important role in Aboriginal social life, and most kin categories are extended so that each speaker is in one of a small set of such kinship relations as “father” or “sister’s daughter” to any other person. Kinship categories shape the grammar of some Australian languages in a way seen nowhere else. In some languages even personal pronouns (we, you, they) referring to two persons have distinct forms depending on the way the two referents are related to each other. Kin terms are routinely conjugated for the person (first, second, third) of their possessor, even in languages that otherwise lack possessive markers on the possessed noun, or else show stem-replacement (suppletion) based on the person of an implied possessor: (my/our) Pop, (your) Dad, (his/her/their) father. Special dyadic terms (translatable as “father-and-child pair” or “mother’s-brother-and-sister’s-child pair,” for example) are widespread, and some languages have full sets of bereavement kin terms (English has just orphan, widow, and widower). In addition to regular kin terms with a simple possessor (“my father,” “your mother’s brother”), certain languages, including Warlpiri (Walpiri), have special triangular kin terms expressing the relation of both speaker and listener to the referent (“my father who is also your mother’s brother”).

Kinship categories are vitally important to Aboriginals because they largely determine appropriate social behaviour. Certain kin, such as the large set of women whom a man calls mother-in-law (which is more accurately labeled with a genealogical category such as “mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter,” since some Aboriginals practice cross-cousin marriage), must be treated with the obsequious deference accorded elsewhere to royalty. Other kin-defined categories are designated for camaraderie, sexual license, or vulgarity. Some of the languages once had, in addition to normal speech, a set of special registers (speech styles with distinctive vocabulary). The register for use in the presence of a mother-in-law or other affines, for example, used high pitch, slow speech rate, and special honorifics and avoided questions and imperatives. Another used in joking relationships contained vocabulary for bawdy insults. Cultural assimilation has made it difficult to study such registers in contemporary life.

Other special registers occurred in male initiation rituals, another area of great cultural emphasis. The Warlpiri, for example, have an antonymic speech register, revealed in extreme secrecy to initiates, by which ordinary words are used to refer to their opposites. (“Another is coming to the village” would mean “I am going to the forest.”) The Lardil have a secret ritual register consisting of just a few words, each with a wide but blurry range of meanings, which are often articulated with bizarre pronunciations (including click consonants like those found in the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa). By comparing the restricted vocabulary of ritual and “in-law” registers with the much larger vocabulary of ordinary speech, linguists have delved deeply into the semantic structure of Australian vocabularies.

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