Tasmanian languages

The Tasmanian languages are a group of languages formerly spoken on the island of Tasmania in Australia. The group is considered to have died out in 1905, with the death of Fanny Cochrane Smith and Truganini. The only remaining documents are songs recorded by Fanny Cochrane Smith on wax cylinders.

Classification

Eight are known to exist, but there may have been as many as 16 different languages. Knowledge about these languages is not enough to make conclusions about possible relationships with other languages. However, its connection to other Australian Aboriginal languages has been proposed based primarily on phonological resemblances. Although it is known that Tasmanians derive from Australian populations, the fact that the island has remained isolated for around 10,000 years makes it unlikely to find relationships with any language groups in Australia, as different works in historical linguistics show that the linguistic relationship it is not recognizable for such large periods.

More recently, its membership in the Indo-Pacific languages has been proposed, but this proposal presents many problems and has been largely ignored.

History

Pressure on Aboriginal people in Tasmania drove many to smaller islands, where some of the languages were able to be maintained as late as 1910. Post-World War II assimilation policies, with the forced removal of families to Tasmania, gave the final lace to what little was left. At the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center an effort is being made to recover what remains of the vocabulary still remembered by the elders and about 100 words from these languages have been collected.

Lexical comparison

The numerals in different Tasamanian varieties:

GLOSA	Northeast	Centroriental	South-East	PROTO- TASMANO
'1'	mërë	Mara	Mara	*marra(wa)
'2'	Puë	pië	Puë	*p'a(wa)