Anēwan

The Anēwan, also written Anaiwan/Anaywan, were the traditional owners of the land around Armidale and the New England tableland in New South Wales.

The Anēwan language, also known as Nganjaywana has been classified by Robert M. W. Dixon as belonging to the Djan-gadi/Nganjaywana subgroup of Central New South Wales, and was one of three varieties of the group, the other dialects being Himberrong and Inuwon. For a long time Anēwan was regarded, like Mbabaram, as a linguistic isolate, ostensibly failing to fit into the known Australian patterns of language, since the material in word-lists taken down of its vocabulary appeared to lack cognates in contiguous languages such as Gamilaraay. The status of its seeming irregularity was solved in 1976 by Terry Crowley who showed that the differences were caused by initial consonant loss which, once accounted for, yielded up over 100 cognate terms between Anēwan and other languages and dialects of the region. One of the peculiarities generated by this phenomenon of initial loss was that many homophones were created between originally distinct words, so that in Anēwan the word for goanna and bull ant became identical (janda).

According to Norman Tindale, the Anēwan's traditional lands measured some 3,200 sq. miles, spreading over the New England tableland from Guyra and Ben Lomond south to Uralla and the Moonbi Range. Northwest their borders ran to Tingha, and encompassed also Bendemeer and Armidale. Neighbouring tribes were the Baanbay to their east; the Djangadi to the south-east, the Yugambal and Ngarabal to their north, and the Gamilaraay to the west.

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