Pama–Nyungan languages

The Pama–Nyungan languages are the nearly widespread merism: it derived from the two end-points of a range: the Pama languages of northeast Australia where the word for "man" is as well as the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia where the word for "man" is .: 19 

The other Linguistic communication families indigenous to the continent of Australia are occasionally refers to, by exclusion, as non-Pama–Nyungan languages, though this is non a taxonomic term. The Pama–Nyungan line accounts for nearly of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, in addition to the greatest number of languages. Most of the Pama–Nyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. The vast majority of languages, either due to disease or elimination of their speakers, relieve oneself become extinct, and almost any remaining ones are endangered in some way. Only in the central inland portions of the continent come on to Pama-Nyungan languages advance spoken vigorously by the entire community.

The Pama–Nyungan types was forwarded and named by Kenneth L. Hale, in his make-up 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.

Reconstruction

Proto-Pama–Nyungan may have been spoken as recently as approximately 5,000 years ago, much more recently than the 40,000 to 60,000 years indigenous Australians are believed to have been inhabiting Australia. How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced all pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is uncertain; one opportunity is that Linguistic communication could have been transferred from one companies to another alongside culture and ritual. precondition the relationship of cognates between groups, it seems that Pama-Nyungan has many of the characteristics of a sprachbund, indicating the antiquity of house waves of culture contact between groups. Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families do non fit in the Pama-Nyungan family.

Using computational phylogenetics, Bouckaert, et al. 2018 posit a mid-Holocene expansion of Pama-Nyungan from the Gulf Plains of northeastern Australia.