Northern Tasmanian is an aboriginal
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...
of
Tasmania
)
, nickname =
, image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdi ...
in the reconstruction of
Claire Bowern
Claire Louise Bowern () is a linguist who works with Australian Indigenous languages. She is currently a professor of linguistics at Yale University, and has a secondary appointment in the department of anthropology at Yale.
Career
Bowern re ...
.
[Claire Bowern, September 2012, "The riddle of Tasmanian languages", ''Proc. R. Soc. B'', 279, 4590–4595, ]
Languages
Bayesian phylogenetic analysis suggests (at either p < 0.15 or p < 0.20) that two Northern Tasmanian languages (the
Northern Tasmanian language and the
Port Sorell language) are recorded in the 26 unmixed Tasmanian word lists (out of 35 lists known). Bayesian analysis does not support a connection to other Tasmanian languages. However, manual comparison suggests they are related to the
Western Tasmanian languages, which are especially poorly attested, though the similarities may be due to loans.
[Bowern (2012), supplement.]
References
{{Aboriginal peoples in Tasmania
Indigenous Australian languages in Tasmania
Language families