Australia Yearbook - 2009-10

Australians in a distant age that some call 'the
Dreamtime'. It is through their own languages,
that Indigenous people maintain their
connection with their ancestors, land, law and
culture.
When people first came to Australia over 40,000
years ago, the continent included New Guinea
and Tasmania in a super-continent called Sahul.
The land bridge connecting Australia to New
Guinea only submerged about 8,000 years ago.
Yet the languages of Australia, except for one,
Meriam Mir, spoken in parts of the Torres
Strait, bear little resemblance to the languages
of New Guinea. 3
Australian Indigenous languages can be divided
into between ten to twenty-four language
families. 4 One language family, the
Pama-Nyungan language family, covers most of
the mainland. The term 'Pama-Nyungan' comes
from the word for 'man' that in some Cape
York languages is pama and is nyunga in the
southwest of Australia. Languages in this family
share some grammatical features and words,
and they are considered to have the same
origin. Map 1 shows some of the
Pama-Nyungan languages that have a word
which originates in the form kami. This word
originally meant ‘mother’s mother’, but in
some languages the meaning has changed to
other meanings such as ‘father’s father’.
As part of an ongoing project to trace the
changes in kinship and social organisation in
Indigenous Australia, using evidence from
1. INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES THAT HAVE A WORD WHICH ORIGINATES IN THE FORM, 'KAMI'
Northern
Territory
Queensland
Western
Australia
South
Australia
New
South
Wales
ACT
Distribution of languages that have a word
which originates in the term, kami.
Victoria
Tasmania
Source: AUSTKIN Project.
30 Year Book Australia 2009–10