Western 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, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1842]
Languages
The Western Tasmanian languages are the most poorly attested of all Tasmanian families. Bayesian phylogenetic analysis suggests (at either p < 0.15 or p < 0.20) that
Northwestern Tasmanian and
Southwestern Tasmanian were distinct languages; several word lists of unrecorded provenance turn out to be Western Tasmanian or to have Western words mixed in.
Bayesian analysis
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and e ...
does not support a connection to other Tasmanian languages. However, manual comparison suggests they are related to the
Northern Tasmanian languages, which are less poorly attested, though the similarities may be due to loans.
Between the region inhabited by Western language groups and other Tasmanian language groups, there is a large strip of land in the western interior where no information has been found or published regarding possible inhabitants. This area has been mapped as having isolated the Western language groups from the rest of Tasmania except by small shared borders along the north and south coasts,
or on one shared border along the south coast only.
Aboriginal Australia map
''published by Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS, Canberra, 1994
References
{{SouthWestTasmania , state=autocollapse
Indigenous Australian languages in Tasmania
Language families
Western Tasmania
South West Tasmania