Tasmanian languages
| Tasmanian | |
|---|---|
| (geographic) | |
| Palawa | |
Fanny Cochrane Smith, last speaker of a Tasmanian Aboriginal language.
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| Region | Tasmania |
| Ethnicity | Tasmanian |
| Extinct | 1905, with the death of Fanny Cochrane Smith |
| Dialects |
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
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Linguist list
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xtz |
| Glottolog |
tasm1247 (bookkeeping code)
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Approximate ethnic divisions in pre-European Tasmania
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The Tasmanian or Palawa languages were the languages indigenous to the island of Tasmania. The languages were last used for daily communication in the 1830s. The last full-blooded Tasmanian died on Flinders Island in 1888, but a Tasmanian lingua franca continued to be used until 1905, with the death of the last known speaker, Fanny Cochrane Smith. Tasmanian Aborigines today speak English.
Tasmanian languages are attested by three dozen word lists, the most extensive being those of Joseph Milligan and George Augustus Robinson. All these show a poor grasp of the sounds of Tasmanian, which appear to have been fairly typical of Australian languages in this parameter. Plomley (1976) presents all the lexical data available to him in 1976. Crowley and Dixon (1981) summarise what little is known of Tasmanian phonology and grammar. Bowern (2012) teases apart the mixture of languages in many of the lists and attempts to classify them into language families.
Little is known of the languages and no relationship to other languages is demonstrable. It appears that there were several language families on Tasmania, which would be in keeping with the long period of human habitation on the island. Joseph Greenberg proposed an Indo-Pacific superfamily which includes Tasmanian along with Andamanese and Papuan (but not Australian). This is not accepted by historical linguists.
Fanny Cochrane Smith recorded a series of wax cylinder recordings of Aboriginal songs, the only existing audio recording of a Tasmanian language, though they are of extremely poor quality, and the lingua franca Smith spoke was likely not pure Tasmanian. In 1972, a woman in Hobart shared with Terry Crowley one sentence and a few words that had been handed down for generations. From these sources, Tasmanian people are seeking to recover their lost languages and traditions. The largest language revival project to date is the Palawa kani project.
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