| Pama–Nyungan | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
most of mainland Australia, with the exception of northern parts of Northern Territory and Western Australia |
| Linguistic classification: | Macro-Pama–Nyungan
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| Proto-language: | Proto-Pama–Nyungan |
| Subdivisions: |
(numerous; see below)
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Pama–Nyungan languages (yellow). Garawa is one of the purple languages. Tankic is purple and yellow.
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The Pama–Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Indigenous Australian languages,[1] containing 160 of 228 identified languages. The name "Pama–Nyungan" is derived from the names of two widely separated groups, the Pama languages from the Northeast, and the Nyungan languages from the Southwest. The terms pama and nyunga are expressions meaning "man" in the languages from their respective regions.
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 proper taxonomic term. There are on the order of hundreds of Pama–Nyungan languages. 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, with thousands of speakers or fewer. Most are considered endangered languages, and many have recently become extinct.
The Pama–Nyungan family was identified and named by Kenneth 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. Noted Australianist R. M. W. Dixon, whose rejection of the standard "family-tree" model of linguistic change[2] departs "rather radically" from accepted views[3] has suggested that diagnostic innovations that define the family[4] have spread across the continent by diffusion, but his arguments have so far failed to convince Australianists.[5]
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Evans and McConvell describe typical Pama–Nyungan languages such as Warlpiri as dependent-marking and exclusively suffixing languages which lack gender, while noting that some non-Pama–Nyungan languages such as Tangkic share this typology and some Pama–Nyungan languages like Yanyuwa, a head-marking and prefixing language with a complicated gender system, diverge from it.[6]
In addition to Hale's 1982 list of words unique to Pama–Nyungan, and in addition to pronouns and case endings they reconstruct for the proto-language, Evans and McConvell report that while some of their roots are implausible, O'Grady and Tryon, nevertheless provide "hundreds of clear cognate sets with attestations throughout the Pama–Nyungan area and absent outside."[7]
Proto-Pama–Nyungan's phonological inventory, as reconstructed by Barry Alpher (2004), is quite similar to those of most present-day Australian languages.
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| High | i iː | u uː |
| Low | a aː | |
Vowel length is contrastive only in the first (i.e. stressed) syllable in a word.
| Bilabial | Apico- alveolar |
Apico- postalveolar |
Laminal | Dorso- velar |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | p | t | rt | c, cʸ | k |
| Nasal | m | n | rn | ñ | ng |
| Lateral | l | rl | λ | ||
| Rhotic | rr | r | |||
| Semivowel | w | y |
Proto-Pama–Nyungan seems to have had only one set of laminal consonants; the two contrasting sets (lamino-dental and lamino-alveopalatal or "palatal") found in some present-day languages can largely be explained as innovations resulting from conditioned sound changes.
Nevertheless, there are a small number of words where an alveopalatal stop is found where a dental would be expected, which are symbolised as *cʸ. There is no convincing evidence, however, of an equivalent nasal *ñʸ or lateral *λʸ.
According to Nicholas Evans at the Australian National University, the closest relative of Pama–Nyungan is the Garawa isolate, followed by the small Tankic family. He then proposes a more distant relationship with the Gunwinyguan languages in a macro-family he calls Macro-Pama–Nyungan.
A fairly aggressive classification of Pama–Nyungan proper includes approximately 175 languages in 14 extant and numerous extinct branches.
In his 1980 attempt to reconstruct Proto-Australian, R. M. W. Dixon reported 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 a language area (Dixon 2002). Some of the small traditionally Pama–Nyungan families which have been demonstrated through the comparative method, or which in Dixon's opinion are likely to be demonstrable, include the following:
He believes that Lower Murray (5 families and isolates), Arandic (2 families, Kaytetye and Arrernte), and Kalkatungic (2 isolates) are small Sprachbunds.
However, the papers in Bowern & Koch (2004) demonstrate about ten traditional groups, including Pama–Nyungan, and its sub-branches such as Arandic, using the comparative method.
In his last published paper from the same collection, Ken Hale describes Dixon's skepticism as an "extravagantly and spectacularly erroneous" and "wrong-headed" 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."[8] 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 the Cape York Peninsula on 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 of Proto-Indo-European.
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