Australian Aboriginal languages

thumb|upright=1.5|The primary typological division in Australian languages: [[Pama–Nyungan languages (tan) and non-Pama–Nyungan languages (mustard and grey)]]

thumb|right|upright=1.5|People who speak Australian Aboriginal languages as a percentage of the population in Australia, divided geographically by statistical local area at the 2011 census

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 percent 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.

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" (Indigenous communities having the opportunity to learn some words and concepts related to the lost language).

250px|right|thumb|Percentage of people in each [[Local government areas of the Northern Territory|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.

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 (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 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 (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.

Families

Glottolog 4.1 (2019)

Glottolog 4.1 (2019) recognises 23 independent families and 9 isolates in Australia, comprising a total of 32 independent language groups.

;Families (23)

Pama-Nyungan (248)
Gunwinyguan (12)
Western Daly (11)
Nyulnyulan (10)
Worrorran (10)
Mirndi (5)
Iwaidjan Proper (4)
Mangarrayi-Maran (4)
Maningrida (4)
Tangkic (4)
Giimbiyu (3) (extinct)
Jarrakan (3)
Yangmanic (3)
Bunaban (2)
Eastern Daly (2) (extinct)
Northern Daly (2)
Southern Daly (2)
Garrwan (2)
Limilngan-Wulna (2) (extinct; would be moribund if Laragiya were included as it is in other breakdowns)
Marrku-Wurrugu (2) (extinct)
North-Eastern Tasmanian (2) (extinct)
South-Eastern Tasmanian (2) (extinct)
Western Tasmanian (2) (extinct)

;Isolates (9)

Gaagudju (extinct)
Kungarakany (extinct)
Laragia (moribund)
Minkin (extinct)
Oyster Bay-Big River-Little Swanport (extinct)
Tiwi
Umbugarla (extinct)
Wadjiginy (moribund)
Wageman (moribund)

Bowern (2011)

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

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)

History

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, In the House of Representatives on 31 August 2016 Linda Burney gave an acknowledgment of country in Wiradjuri in her first speech and was sung in by Lynette Riley in Wiradjuri from the public gallery.

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. As part of the efforts to raise awareness of the Wiradjuri language, a Grammar of Wiradjuri language was published in 2014 and A new Wiradjuri dictionary in 2010.

The New South Wales Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 became law on 24 October 2017 and established a board to advise on the preservation of Aboriginal languages that is known as the Aboriginal Languages Trust. It was the first legislation in Australia to acknowledge the significance of first languages.

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. The coin was designed by Aleksandra Stokic in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups. provides a valuable resource for those researching especially Western Australian languages, and some languages of the Northern Territory and South Australia. The project is co-ordinated by Nick Thieberger, who works in collaboration with the National Library of Australia "to have all the microfilmed images from Section XII of the Bates papers digitised". The project is succeeded by the Nyingarn Project

, which digitises manuscripts and crowdsources transcriptions through DigiVol.

Language revival

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

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. 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. The palawa kani Language Program has been in the works since the early 1990s. Due to the linguistic ethnocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians, palawa kani is the only Aboriginal language of Lutruwita/Tasmania today.

Common features

"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."

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.

Phonetics and phonology

The following represents a canonical 6-place Australian Aboriginal consonant system. It does not represent any single language, but is instead a simplified form of the consonant inventory of what would be found in many Australian languages, including most Arandic and Yolŋu languages.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! colspan="2" rowspan="3" |

! colspan="2" rowspan="2" |Peripheral

! colspan="4" |Coronal

! colspan="2" |Apical

! colspan="2" |Laminal

!Bilabial

!Velar

!Alveolar

!Retroflex

!Dental

!Alveolo-palatal

!Obstruent

!Plosive

! rowspan="4" |Sonorant

!Nasal

!Lateral

!Rhotic

!Glide

| colspan="2" |

Segmental inventory

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

There is almost never a voicing contrast; that is, a consonant may sound like a at the beginning of a word, but like a 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 the otherwise universal . In the few cases where fricatives do occur, they developed recently through the lenition (weakening) of stops, and are therefore non-sibilants like rather than the sibilants like 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. Some 10-15% of Australian languages have four places of articulation, with two coronal places of articulation, 40-50% have five places, and 40-45% have six places of articulation, including four coronals. The four-way distinction in the coronal region is commonly accomplished through two variables: the position of the tongue (front, alveolar or dental, or retroflex), and its shape (apical or laminal).

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 many 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, spoken in the Torres Strait Islands, which has an inventory more like its Papuan neighbours than the languages of the Australian mainland, including full voice contrasts: , dental , alveolar , the sibilants (which have allophonic variation with and respectively) and velar , 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 (, , , , , , , ), 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 (, , , , ) 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 and .

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.

Phonotactics

Some have suggested that the most appropriate unit to describe the phonotactics of Australian languages is the phonological word. The most common word length is two syllables, and a typical phonological word would have the form:

with the first syllable being stressed. The optionality of C is cross-linguistically normal, since coda consonants are weak or nonexistent in many languages, as well as in the early stages of language acquisition. The weakening of C, on the other hand, is very unusual. No Australian language has consonant clusters in this position, and those languages with fortis and lenis distinctions do not make such distinctions in this position. Place of articulation distinctions are also less common in this position, and lenitions and deletions are historically common here. While in most languages the word-initial position is prominent, maintaining all a language's contrasts, that is not the case in Australia. Here the prominent position is C(C), in the middle of the word. C is typically the only position allowing all of a language's place of articulation contrasts. Fortis/lenis contrasts can only occur at C, or at C when C is a sonorant. Consonant clusters are often restricted to the C(C) position, and are most commonly sonorant + obstruent sequences. In languages with pre-stopped nasals or laterals, those sounds only occur at C.

Australian languages typically resist certain connected speech processes which might blur the place of articulation of consonants at C(C), such as anticipatory assimilation of place of articulation, which is common around the world. In Australia, this type of assimilation seems only to have affected consonants within the apical and laminal categories. There's little evidence of assimilation between the labial, apical, laminal, and dorsal categories. Many proto-Pama–Nyungan and clusters have been preserved across Australia. Heterorganic nasal + stop sequences remain stable even in modern connected speech, which is highly unusual.

The anticipatory assimilation of nasality is quite common in various languages around the world. Typically, a vowel will become nasalized before a following nasal consonant. However, this process is resisted in Australian languages.

There was a historical process in many languages where nasal + stop CC clusters lost the nasal element if C was a nasal. Also, many languages have morphophonemic alterations whereby initial nasals in suffixes are denasalized if the preceding stem contains a nasal consonant.

While the existence of phonemic pre-stopped nasals and laterals, contrasting with plain nasals and laterals, has been documented in some Australian languages, nasals and laterals are pre-stopped on a phonetic level in most languages of the continent. These phenomena are the result of a general resistance to the anticipatory assimilation of nasality and laterality. The lack of assimilation makes coda nasals and laterals more acoustically distinct.

Most speakers of Australian languages speak with a 'pressed' voice quality, with the glottal opening narrower than in modal voice, a relatively high frequency of creaky voice, and low airflow. This may be due to an avoidance of breathy voice. This pressed quality could therefore serve to enhance the clarity of speech and ensure the perception of place of articulation distinctions.

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.

{| class="wikitable"

! scope="col" | Language

! scope="col" | Example

! scope="col" | Translation

! scope="col" | Type

! scope="row" style="text-align: left;" | Pitjantjatjara

| paṉa

| 'earth, dirt, ground; land'

| diacritic (underline) indicates retroflex 'n'

! scope="row" style="text-align: left;" | Wajarri

| nhanha

| 'this, this one'

| digraph indicating 'n' with dental articulation

! scope="row" style="text-align: left;" | Yolŋu

| yolŋu

| 'person, man'

| 'ŋ' (from IPA) for velar nasal

Demographics (2016)

In the Northern Territory, 62.5% of Aboriginal Australians spoke an indigenous language at home in 2016. In Queensland, almost 95% of Torres Strait Islanders spoke an indigenous language at home in 2016.

Nicholas Evans
Rachel Nordlinger

Notes

Citations

Sources

Bowern, C. 2011. Oxford Bibliographies Online: Australian Languages
*
McConvell, Patrick & Claire Bowern. 2011. The prehistory and internal relationships of Australian languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 5(1). 19–32.

External links

Cultures and languages are strong, supported and flourishing Data relating to the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages spoken in Australia and its States and Territories.
50 Words Project (audio recordings of 50 words in Australian Indigenous languages)
CHIRILA: A database of the languages of Australia (Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia)
CHIRILA, Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab
Gambay - First Languages Map, an interactive map of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander word lists, State Library of Queensland.
Spoken: celebrating Queensland languages digital stories, State Library of Queensland