First Nations Languages

“There were a lot of Aboriginal dialects, weren’t there?”

“No, there wasn’t”, is the answer.

“There were a lot of Aboriginal languages.”

When Capt Cook first arrived there were around 250 Australian Indigenous languages, as different to each other as Spanish is to English, as Hindi is to Mandarin.

Different vocab, different sounds, different grammar.

Sure, there was some relationship between them, having originated from some original source way back in time.

But the similarity between an Arnhem Land language, for instance, and a Western Desert language is insignificant.

Pick any geographically opposite locations on the Australian map and there are unlikely to be two less similar languages spoken at each point.

Each language may have a few dialects within them, as communities speaking a language settled in different locations.

The Nyangumarta speakers of Warralong are distinctive from the Nyangumarta speakers further north at LaGrange.

So, when you come to me to ask for the Aboriginal word for ‘dog’, I’ll always ask, “In which language?”

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