Over the weekend I was asked to help in a conversation between two family groups from Central Australia who were in a Sorry Camp. One family spoke Ngaanyatjarra and the other Arrernte from the Alice Springs area. With both parties speaking several Indigenous languages, English was the only language they had in common.
The Ockham’s Razor program on ABC Radio National recently had a program looking at the variety of Indigenous languages in Australia. Assistant Professor Claire Bowern from the Linguistics Department at Yale University spoke about the languages of the Aboriginal people of Australia, how and where we used Aboriginal words, and what that tells us of our (whitefella) interaction with Aboriginal Australia during colonisation.
At the time of European settlement, about 250 distinct languages were spoken in Australia. About the same number of languages are spoken in Europe today. But the level of diversity in the families is very different. There are five language families in Europe.
In comparison, the Australian continent was much more diverse: there are 28 different families on the Australian mainland, and that does not include Tasmania or the Eastern Torres Strait Islands. There isn’t just one Aboriginal language, or one language family even; so when someone asks what to call their boat in Aboriginal, that’s kind of like asking what to call it in European. None of these languages are related to anything in Papua-New Guinea or South-East Asia either.
The transcript and audio can be found here.
You can find some of Claire’s work on an extinct Aboriginal language, Nhirrpi, here. It is from North East South Australia, a place I used to call home. The Yandruwandha people, though spread around Australia currently have this country under Native Title claim.
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