Language
The Wangal people were part of the Eora (aka Dharawal, Darug, Dharuk) language speaking group, who contributed to contemporary Australian English words like dingo, woomera, wallaby, wombat, and waratah.
The Wangal people and their Eora neighbours, the Cadigal people, were heavily impacted by early British settlement, many dying from smallpox or being pushed from their lands by the early settlers, and ceasing to be acknowledged and known as a viable, functioning social group within twenty years or so of 1788.
The Eora / Dharawal / Darug language has since been reconstructed from the many notes made of it by the original colonists, although there has been no known oral language tradition continuing over the last one hundred years.
Read more about this topic: Wangal People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen—but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)