Language Families
Pama-Nyungan
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The largest family of Aboriginal Australian languages, comprising 306 of the continent's roughly 400 documented Aboriginal languages and covering most of mainland Australia outside the northern parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Proto-Pama-Nyungan has been reconstructed and computational phylogenetic work suggests the family began expanding from the Gulf Plains of northeastern Australia in the mid-Holocene, perhaps as recently as 5,000 years ago.
Facts
Disputed
Proto-Language StatusProto-Pama-Nyungan is reconstructed and computational phylogenetic studies of vocabulary support the family as a genuine genetic grouping descended from a common ancestor roughly 5,000 years ago. 1 R.M.W. Dixon has argued he could find nothing that reliably sets Pama-Nyungan apart as a valid genetic group and treats the similarities among Australian languages as the product of contact within a sprachbund rather than shared descent. RegionMost of mainland Australia, excluding the northern parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
How many speakers do the Pama-Nyungan languages total today?
Sources describe most Pama-Nyungan languages as spoken by small ethnic groups of a few hundred speakers or fewer, with almost all remaining ones endangered, but no tertiary source consulted sums these many small communities into a single family-wide total.
What would resolve this An Australian government or AIATSIS-level survey aggregating speaker counts across every living Pama-Nyungan language at one point in time.
Australian Aboriginal linguisticsWikipedia: Pama-Nyungan Languages
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Proto-Language Status
Dixon has argued he could find nothing that reliably sets Pama-Nyungan apart as a valid genetic group, and abandoned the classification in favor of treating Australian languages as a sprachbund shaped by contact and diffusion rather than a family descended from a common ancestor.
A dissenting reading, from R.M.W. DixonWikipedia: Pama-Nyungan Languages, Wikimedia Foundation
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