Why Australia is home to one of the largest language families in the world

Why Australia is home to one of the largest language families in the world

By Michael Erard Sep. 21, 2016 , 1:00 PM



The first person to set foot on the continent of Australia was a woman named Warramurrungunji. She emerged from the sea onto an island off northern Australia, and then headed inland, creating children and putting each one in a specific place. As she moved across the landscape, Warramurrungunji told each child, "I am putting you here. This is the language you should talk! This is your language!"

This myth, from the Iwaidja people of northwestern Australia, has more than a grain of truth, for the peopling and language origins of Australia are closely entwined, says linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. But researchers have long puzzled over both. When Europeans colonized Australia 250 years ago, the continent was home to an estimated half-million to 2 million people who were organized into about 700 different groups and spoke at least 300 languages.

Linguists have struggled to work out how these languages were related and when they emerged. Each was spoken by relatively few people, and as cultures were wiped out by disease and violence, many languages vanished before they could be studied. Researchers prioritized gathering information from the few remaining speakers over deciphering ancient language relationships. But in recent years, researchers borrowing methods used in biology to derive evolutionary trees have begun to unravel the Australian linguistic puzzle. And this week, the approach takes a major step forward, with a combined genetic and linguistic study of the largest Australian language family.

The paper, published in this week's issue of Nature along with two other genomic studies of the peopling of Australia, offers a modern version of Warramurrungunji's story. It paints a picture of how people entered and spread across the continent, giving birth to new languages as they went. It's "a major advance," says Peter Hiscock, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. "It presents evidence for an elaborate population history in Australia, spanning 50 millennia." The study, led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, also marks a milestone in collaboration between geneticists and linguists, who for years stayed in their separate camps.

More:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/why-australia-home-one-largest-language-families-world