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Pama–Nyungan languages

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Pama–Nyungan
Geographic
distribution		Most of mainlandAustralia,with the exception of northern parts ofNorthern TerritoryandWestern Australia
Linguistic classificationMacro-Pama–Nyungan?
  • Greater Pama–Nyungan
    • Pama–Nyungan
Proto-languageProto-Pama–Nyungan
Subdivisions
  • plus unclassified languages
Linguasphere29-A to 29-X (provisional)
Glottologpama1250
Pama–Nyungan languages (yellow)
Other Macro-Pama–Nyungan (green and orange)

ThePama–Nyungan languagesare the most widespreadfamilyofAustralian Aboriginal languages,[1]containing 306 out of 400 Aboriginal languages in Australia.[2]The name "Pama–Nyungan" is amerism:it is derived from the two end-points of the range, thePama languagesof northeast Australia (where the word for "man" ispama) and theNyungan languagesof southwest Australia (where the word for "man" isnyunga).[2]

The other language families indigenous to the continent of Australia are occasionally referred to, by exclusion, as non-Pama–Nyungan languages, though this is not a taxonomic term. The Pama–Nyungan family accounts for most of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, and the greatest number of languages. Most of the Pama–Nyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. Many languages, either due to disease or elimination of their speakers, have become extinct, and almost all remaining ones are endangered in some way. Only in the central inland portions of the continent do Pama–Nyungan languages remain spoken vigorously by the entire community.

The Pama–Nyungan family was identified and named byKenneth L. Hale,in his work on the classification of Native Australian languages. Hale's research led him to the conclusion that of the Aboriginal Australian languages, one relatively closely interrelated family had spread and proliferated over most of the continent, while approximately a dozen other families were concentrated along the North coast.

Typology[edit]

Evans and McConvell describe typical Pama–Nyungan languages such as Warlpiri asdependent-markingand exclusively suffi xing languages which lack gender, while noting that some non-Pama–Nyungan languages such asTangkicshare this typology and some Pama–Nyungan languages likeYanyuwa,a head-marking and prefi xing language with a complicated gender system, diverge from it.[3]

Reconstruction[edit]

Main article:Proto-Pama–Nyungan
Proto-Pama–Nyungan
Reconstruction ofPama–Nyungan
RegionGulf Plains,NE Australia
Eraperhapsc. 3000 BCE

Proto-Pama–Nyungan may have been spoken as recently as about 5,000 years ago, much more recently than the 40,000 to 60,000 yearsindigenous Australiansare believed to have been inhabitingAustralia.How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is uncertain; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another alongsidecultureandritual.[4][5]Given the relationship of cognates between groups, it seems that Pama–Nyungan has many of the characteristics of asprachbund,indicating the antiquity of multiple waves of culture contact between groups.[6]Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families do not fit in the Pama–Nyungan family.[7]

TheGulf Plains,the Proto-Pama–Nyungan homeland

Usingcomputational phylogenetics,Bouckaert, Bowern & Atkinson (2018)posit a mid-Holoceneexpansion of Pama–Nyungan from theGulf Plainsof northeastern Australia.

Phonotactics[edit]

Pama–Nyungan languages generally share several broad phonotactic constraints: single-consonant onsets, a lack of fricatives, and a prohibition againstliquids(laterals and rhotics) beginning words. Voiced fricatives have developed in several scattered languages, such asAnguthimri,though often the sole alleged fricative is/ɣ/and is analysed as an approximant/ɰ/by other linguists. An exception isKala Lagaw Ya,which acquired both fricatives and a voicing contrast in them and in its plosives from contact withPapuan languages.Several of the languages ofVictoriaallowed initial/l/,and one—Gunai—also allowed initial/r/and consonant clusters/kr/and/pr/,a trait shared with the extinctTasmanian languagesacross the Bass Strait.[citation needed]

Classification[edit]

At the time of the European arrival in Australia, there were some 300 Pama–Nyungan languages divided across three dozen branches.[8]What follows are the languages listed inBowern (2011b)andBowern (2012);numbers in parentheses are the numbers of languages in each branch. These vary from languages so distinct they are difficult to demonstrate as being in the same branch, to near-dialects on par with the differences between theScandinavian languages.[8]

Traditional conservative classification[edit]

Down the east coast, fromCape Yorkto theBass Strait,there are:

Continuing along the south coast, from Melbourne to Perth:

Up the west coast:

Cutting inland back to Paman, south of the northern non-Pama–Nyungan languages, are

Encircled by these branches are:

Separated to the north of the rest of Pama–Nyungan is

Some of inclusions in each branch are only provisional, as many languages became extinct before they could be adequately documented. Not included are dozens of poorly attested and extinct languages such asBarranbinjaand theLower Burdekin languages.

A few more inclusive groups that have been proposed, such asNortheast Pama–Nyungan(Pama–Maric),Central New South Wales,andSouthwest Pama–Nyungan,appear to be geographical rather than genealogical groups.[citation needed]

Bowern & Atkinson[edit]

Bowern & Atkinson (2012)usecomputational phylogeneticsto calculate the following classification:[9]

External relations[edit]

According toNicholas Evans,the closest relative of Pama–Nyungan is theGarawan language family,followed by the smallTangkicfamily. He then proposes a more distant relationship with theGunwinyguan languagesin a macro-family he callsMacro-Pama–Nyungan.[10]However, this has yet to be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the linguistic community.

Validity[edit]

Dixon's scepticism[edit]

In his 1980 attempt to reconstruct Proto-Australian,R. M. W. Dixonreported that he was unable to find anything that reliably set Pama–Nyungan apart as a valid genetic group. Fifteen years later, he had abandoned the idea that Australian or Pama–Nyungan were families. He now sees Australian as aSprachbund(Dixon 2002). Some of the small traditionally Pama–Nyungan families which have been demonstrated through thecomparative method,or which in Dixon's opinion are likely to be demonstrable, include the following:

He believes that Lower Murray (five families and isolates), Arandic (2 families, Kaytetye and Arrernte), and Kalkatungic (2 isolates) are smallSprachbunds.

Dixon's theories of Australian languagediachronyhave been based on a model ofpunctuated equilibrium(adapted from the eponymous model inevolutionary biology) wherein he believes Australian languages to be ancient and to have—for the most part—remained in unchanging equilibrium with the exception of sporadic branching orspeciation eventsin thephylogenetic tree.Part of Dixon's objections to the Pama–Nyungan family classification is the lack of obvious binary branching points which are implicitly or explicitly entailed by his model.

Mainstream rejoinders[edit]

However, the papers inBowern & Koch (2004)demonstrate about ten traditional groups, including Pama–Nyungan, and its sub-branches such as Arandic, using thecomparative method.

In his last published paper from the same collection,Ken Haledescribes Dixon's scepticism as an erroneous phylogenetic assessment which is "so bizarrely faulted, and such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte."[11]In the same work Hale provides unique 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 theCape York Peninsulaon the Australian northeast coast and Proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 km apart (as well as from many other languages), to support the Pama–Nyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that ofProto-Indo-European.

Bowern (2006)[edit]

Bowern offered an alternative to Dixon's binary phylogenetic-tree model based in the principles ofdialect geography.[12]Rather than discarding the notion that multiple subgroups of languages are genetically related due to the presence of multiple dialectal epicentres arranged around starkisoglosses,Bowern proposed that the non-binary-branching characteristics of Pama–Nyungan languages are precisely what we would expect to see from a language continuum in which dialects are diverging linguistically but remaining in close geographic and social contact. Bowern offered three main advantages of this geographical-continuum model over the punctuated equilibrium model:

First, there is a place for both divergence and convergence as processes of language change; punctuated equilibrium stresses convergence as the main mechanism of language change in Australia. Second, it makes Pama-Nyungan look much more similar to other areas of the world. We no longer have to assume that Australia is a special case. Third, and related to this, we do not have to assume in this model that there has been intensive diffusion of many linguistic elements that in other parts of the world are resistant to borrowing (such as shared irregularities).

— (Bowern 2006,p. 257)

Bowern & Atkinson (2012)[edit]

Additional methods of computational phylogenetics employed by Bowern and Atkinson[9]uncovered that there were more binary-branching characteristics than initially thought. Instead of acceding to the notion that Pama–Nyungan languages do not share the characteristics of a binary-branching language family, the computational methods revealed that inter-language loan rates were not as atypically high as previously imagined and do not obscure the features that would allow for a phylogenetic approach. This finding functioned as a kind of rejoinder to Dixon's scepticism.

Our work puts to rest once and for all the claim that Australian languages are so exceptional that methods used elsewhere in the world do not work on this continent. The methods presented here have been used with Bantu, Austronesian, Indo-European, and Japonic languages (among others). Pama-Nyungan languages, like all languages, show a mixture of histories that reflect both contact and inheritance.

— (Bowern & Atkinson 2012,p. 839)

Bowern and Atkinson's computational model is currently the definitive model of Pama–Nyungan intra-relatedness and diachrony.[citation needed]

See also[edit]

Citations[edit]

  1. ^Frawley,p. 232.
  2. ^abZuckermann et al. 2021,p. 19.
  3. ^Evans & McConvell 1998,p.176.
  4. ^O'Grady & Hale 2004,pp. 91–92.
  5. ^Evans & Rhys.
  6. ^Nichols 1997.
  7. ^Dixon 1997.
  8. ^abBowern 2011a.
  9. ^abBowern & Atkinson 2012.
  10. ^McConvell & Evans 1997.
  11. ^O'Grady & Hale 2004.
  12. ^Bowern 2006.

References[edit]

Data sets
  • Bowern, Claire; Rzymski, Christoph; Forkel, Robert; Tresoldi, Tiago; List, Johann-Mattis (21 July 2021),CLDF dataset derived from Bowern and Atkinson's "Internal Structure of Pama-Nyungan" from 2012,doi:10.5281/zenodo.1312841GitHub repository

External links[edit]

Wiktionaryhas a list of reconstructed forms atAppendix:Proto-Pama-Nyungan reconstructions
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