The PamaâÂÂNyungan languages ( ) are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, comprising 306 of the 400 Aboriginal languages of Australia. The name "PamaâÂÂNyungan" is a merism: it is derived from the two end-points of the range, the Pama languages of northeast Australia (where the word for 'man' is ) and the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia (where the word for 'man' is ).
The other language families indigenous to the continent of Australia are often referred to, by exclusion, as non-PamaâÂÂNyungan languages, though this is not a taxonomic term. The PamaâÂÂNyungan family accounts for most of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, and the greatest number of languages. Most of the PamaâÂÂNyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. Many languages have become extinct, and almost all remaining ones are endangered in some way. Only in the central inland portions of the continent do PamaâÂÂNyungan languages continue to be spoken vigorously by the entire community.
The first descriptions of languages from this family were found in missionary grammars from the early 19th century, but the PamaâÂÂNyungan family itself was identified and named only by Kenneth L. Hale in his work 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.
Evans and McConvell describe typical PamaâÂÂNyungan languages such as Warlpiri as dependent-marking and exclusively suffixing languages that lack gender, while noting that some non-PamaâÂÂNyungan languages such as Tangkic share this typology and some PamaâÂÂNyungan languages like Yanyuwa, a head-marking and prefixing language with a complicated gender system, diverge from it.
Proto-PamaâÂÂNyungan may have been spoken as recently as about 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 PamaâÂÂNyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-PamaâÂÂNyungan languages is uncertain; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another along with culture and ritual. Given the relationship of cognates between groups, it seems that PamaâÂÂNyungan has many of the characteristics of a sprachbund, indicating the antiquity of multiple waves of culture contact between groups. Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families do not fit in the PamaâÂÂNyungan family.
Using computational phylogenetics, Bouckaert, Bowern & Atkinson posit a mid-Holocene expansion of PamaâÂÂNyungan from the Gulf Plains of northeastern Australia.
PamaâÂÂNyungan languages generally share several broad phonotactic constraints: single-consonant onsets, a lack of fricatives, and a prohibition against liquids (laterals and rhotics) beginning words. Voiced fricatives have developed in several scattered languages, such as Anguthimri, though often the sole alleged fricative is and is analysed as an approximant by other linguists. An exception is Kala Lagaw Ya, which acquired both fricatives and a voicing contrast in them and in its plosives from contact with Papuan languages. Several of the languages of Victoria allowed initial , and oneâÂÂGunaiâÂÂalso allowed initial and consonant clusters and , a trait shared with the extinct Tasmanian languages across the Bass Strait.
At the time of the European arrival in Australia, there were some 300 PamaâÂÂNyungan languages divided across three dozen branches. What follows are the languages listed by Bowern; numbers in parentheses are the numbers of languages in each branch. These range from languages so distinct they are difficult to demonstrate as being in the same branch, to near-dialects whose differences are on par with those between the Scandinavian languages.
Down the east coast, from Cape York to the Bass Strait, there are:
Continuing along the south coast, from Melbourne to Perth:
Up the west coast:
Cutting inland back to Paman, south of the northern non-PamaâÂÂNyungan languages, are
Encircled by these branches are:
Separated to the north of the rest of PamaâÂÂNyungan is
Some of inclusions in each branch are only provisional, as many languages became extinct before they could be adequately documented. Not included are dozens of poorly attested and extinct languages, such as Barranbinja and the Lower Burdekin languages.
A few more inclusive groups that have been proposed, such as Northeast PamaâÂÂNyungan (PamaâÂÂMaric), Central New South Wales, and Southwest PamaâÂÂNyungan, appear to be geographical rather than genealogical groups.
Bowern & Atkinson use computational phylogenetics to calculate the following classification:
According to Nicholas Evans, the closest relative of PamaâÂÂNyungan is the Garawan language family, followed by the small Tangkic family. He then proposes a more distant relationship with the Gunwinyguan languages in a macro-family he calls Macro-PamaâÂÂNyungan. However, this has yet to be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the linguistic community.
In his 1980 attempt to reconstruct Proto-Australian, R. M. W. Dixon reported that he was unable to find anything that reliably set PamaâÂÂNyungan apart as a valid genetic group. Fifteen years later, he had abandoned the idea that Australian or PamaâÂÂNyungan were families. He now sees Australian as a Sprachbund. Some of the small traditionally PamaâÂÂNyungan families which have been demonstrated through the comparative method, or which in Dixon's opinion are likely to be demonstrable, include the following:
He believes that Lower Murray (five families and isolates), Arandic (2 families, Kaytetye and Arrernte), and Kalkatungic (2 isolates) are small Sprachbunds.
Dixon's theories of Australian language diachrony have been based on a model of punctuated equilibrium (adapted from the eponymous model in evolutionary biology) wherein he believes Australian languages to be ancient and to haveâÂÂfor the most partâÂÂremained in unchanging equilibrium with the exception of sporadic branching or speciation events in the phylogenetic tree. Part of Dixon's objections to the PamaâÂÂNyungan family classification is the lack of obvious binary branching points which are implicitly or explicitly entailed by his model.
However, the papers in demonstrate about ten traditional groups, including PamaâÂÂNyungan, and its sub-branches such as Arandic, using the comparative method.
In his last published paper from the same collection, Ken Hale describes Dixon's scepticism as an erroneous phylogenetic assessment which is "so bizarrely faulted, and such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte." In the same work Hale provides unique pronominal and grammatical evidence (with suppletion) as well as more than fifty basic-vocabulary cognates (showing regular sound correspondences) between the Proto-Northern-and-Middle Pamic (pNMP) family of the Cape York Peninsula on the Australian northeast coast and Proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 km apart (as well as from many other languages), to support the PamaâÂÂNyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that of Proto-Indo-European.
Bowern offered an alternative to Dixon's binary phylogenetic-tree model based in the principles of dialect geography. Rather than discarding the notion that multiple subgroups of languages are genetically related due to the presence of multiple dialectal epicentres arranged around stark isoglosses, Bowern proposed that the non-binary-branching characteristics of PamaâÂÂNyungan languages are precisely what we would expect to see from a language continuum in which dialects are diverging linguistically but remaining in close geographic and social contact. Bowern offered three main advantages of this geographical-continuum model over the punctuated equilibrium model:
Additional methods of computational phylogenetics employed by Bowern and Atkinson uncovered that there were more binary-branching characteristics than initially thought. Instead of acceding to the notion that PamaâÂÂNyungan languages do not share the characteristics of a binary-branching language family, the computational methods revealed that inter-language loan rates were not as atypically high as previously imagined and do not obscure the features that would allow for a phylogenetic approach. This finding functioned as a kind of rejoinder to Dixon's scepticism.
Bowern and Atkinson's computational model is currently the definitive model of PamaâÂÂNyungan intra-relatedness and diachrony.