Tasmanian Languages

Tasmanian Languages

The Tasmanian or Palawa languages were the languages indigenous to the island of Tasmania.

Though the last full-blooded Tasmanian died on Flinders Island in 1888, a Tasmanian lingua franca continued to be used on Flinders and Cape Barren Islands. This is believed to have gone extinct in 1905, with the death of the last known speaker, Fanny Cochrane Smith. Tasmanian Aborigines today speak English.

There are 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, of a language last spoken for daily communication in the 1830s. 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.