page_title: Pama–Nyungan languages
section_title: Reconstruction
hierarchical_section_title: Pama–Nyungan languages / Reconstruction
caption_attribution_description: This is a map of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation of Australia (IBRA), with state boundaries overlaid. The Gulf Plains region is shown in red.
context_page_description: The Pama–Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, containing perhaps 300 languages. The name "Pama–Nyungan" is derived from the names of the two most widely separated groups, the Pama languages of the northeast and the Nyungan languages of the southwest. The words pama and nyunga mean "man" in their respective languages.
  The other language families indigenous to the continent of Australia are occasionally referred to, by exclusion, as non-Pama–Nyungan languages, though this is not a taxonomic term. The Pama–Nyungan family accounts for most of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, and the greatest number of languages. Most of the Pama–Nyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. The vast majority of languages, either due to disease or elimination of their speakers, have become extinct, and almost all remaining ones are endangered in some way. Only in the central inland portions of the continent do Pama-Nyungan languages remain spoken vigorously by the entire community.
  The Pama–Nyungan family was identified and named by Kenneth L.
context_section_description: Proto-Pama–Nyungan may have been spoken as recently as about 5,000 years ago, much more recently than the 40,000 to 60,000 years indigenous Australians are believed to have been inhabiting Australia. How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is uncertain; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another alongside culture and ritual. Given the relationship of cognates between groups, it seems that Pama-Nyungan has many of the characteristics of a sprachbund, indicating the antiquity of multiple waves of culture contact between groups. Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families do not fit in the Pama-Nyungan family.
  Using computational phylogenetics, Bouckaert, et al. (2018) posit a mid-Holocene expansion of Pama-Nyungan from the Gulf Plains of northeastern Australia.
caption: The Gulf Plains, the Proto-Pama–Nyungan homeland.
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