Northwestern Tasmanian, or Peerapper ("Pirapa"), is an
Aboriginal language of
Tasmania
Tasmania (; palawa kani: ''Lutruwita'') is an island States and territories of Australia, state of Australia. It is located to the south of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland, and is separated from it by the Bass Strait. The sta ...
in the reconstruction of
Claire Bowern.
[Claire Bowern, September 2012, "The riddle of Tasmanian languages", ''Proc. R. Soc. B'', 279, 4590–4595, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1842] It was spoken along the west coast of the island, from
Macquarie Harbour
Macquarie Harbour is a shallow fjord in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia. It is approximately , and has an average depth of , with deeper places up to . It is navigable by shallow-draft vessels. The main channel is kept clear by th ...
north to
Circular Head and
Robbins Island.
Northwestern Tasmanian is poorly attested from four word lists: The "west coast" vocabularies of Charles Robinson and
George Augustus Robinson
George Augustus Robinson (22 March 1791 – 18 October 1866) was an English born builder and self-trained preacher who was employed by the British colonial authorities to conciliate the Indigenous Australians of Van Diemen's Land and the Po ...
, with 246 words combined; the
Robbins Island list of George Augustus Robinson, with 162 words; and the Macquarie Harbour vocabularies of
Allan Cunningham (222 words), collected in 1819.
[Bowern (2012), supplement]
The list collected by George Augustus Robinson at
West Point
The United States Military Academy (USMA), commonly known as West Point, is a United States service academies, United States service academy in West Point, New York that educates cadets for service as Officer_(armed_forces)#United_States, comm ...
("Western Tribes") is divergent, and falls out as a separate language in Bowern. However, it includes only 28 words, so little can be definitively said.
References
Western Tasmanian languages
Languages extinct in the 19th century
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