Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and plates
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations and conventions
- 1 AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES
- 2 DYIRBAL: THE LANGUAGE AND ITS SPEAKERS
- 3 WORD CLASSES
- 4 SYNTAX
- 5 DEEP SYNTAX
- 6 MORPHOLOGY
- 7 PHONOLOGY
- 8 SEMANTICS
- 9 LEXICON
- 10 PREHISTORY
- APPENDIX A DYIRBAL LOGIC
- APPENDIX B PREVIOUS WORK ON DYIRBAL
- TEXTS
- VOCABULARY
- LIST OF DYIRBAL AFFIXES
- REFERENCES
- INDEX OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES
- Plate section
1 - AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and plates
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations and conventions
- 1 AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES
- 2 DYIRBAL: THE LANGUAGE AND ITS SPEAKERS
- 3 WORD CLASSES
- 4 SYNTAX
- 5 DEEP SYNTAX
- 6 MORPHOLOGY
- 7 PHONOLOGY
- 8 SEMANTICS
- 9 LEXICON
- 10 PREHISTORY
- APPENDIX A DYIRBAL LOGIC
- APPENDIX B PREVIOUS WORK ON DYIRBAL
- TEXTS
- VOCABULARY
- LIST OF DYIRBAL AFFIXES
- REFERENCES
- INDEX OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES
- Plate section
Summary
This chapter surveys, rather briefly, some of the recurring linguistic features of languages across the continent. It does not purport to be a complete ‘Handbook of Australian languages’ and does not attempt to list the many individual variations from the basic pattern.
Further details on some of the points mentioned below will be found in the surveys by Schmidt, Ray [1925], Capell and Wurm. Schmidt [1912, 1919] draws some intelligent conclusions from the rather scanty and inaccurate published material then available. Capell [1956] gives a great deal of important information, much of it based on his own field work; but even in 1956 far less was known about Australian languages than today and some of Capell's data is, for instance, phonetically suspect. Wurm's [forthcoming] readable survey essentially repeats and expands some of Capell's ideas, and includes a lexicographic classification of Australian languages (see 10.1).
General
There were perhaps 600 aboriginal tribes in Australia at the time of the European invasion at the end of the eighteenth century [Tindale, 1940]. Each tribe spoke a distinct dialect, which usually had considerable lexical and grammatical similarities to neighbouring dialects. The existence of extensive dialect chains makes it difficult to put an exact figure on the number of distinct aboriginal languages; recent guesses have been that there were about 200 [Wurm, 1965; O'Grady et al., 1966].
On the basis of the similarities summarised below it has for some time seemed likely that at least the majority of Australian languages are genetically related.
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- The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland , pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972