Talk:List of Australian Aboriginal languages

message: OK am updating from the AIATSIS web site. Enlil Ninlil 05:29, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Languages

message: Hi,
I like some of the columns in the tables on my user page. Can we discuss adding some columns to the data on this page?
Comments welcomed,
--Ling.Nut 22:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The fields on my user page: OK to add new table columns to the tables on this page? 

message: *Here, please take all info as needed. I'm working on other lists/tables. Since ya'll want to keep this one here, it's yours. Ling.Nut (WP:3IAR) 07:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok I will do something with this in the comming months. Thanks Enlil Ninlil (talk) 06:52, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  large table cut from my user space 

message: The language of the Brisbane / Moreton Bay area is missing from this list, Wikipedia, ISO 639, and Ethnologue.
Known as Yagara / Jagara / Yuggera /etc
It has contributed some words to Australian English:
* "bung" (broken)
* "dillybag"
* "yakka" (hard work)
— Hippietrail (talk) 01:53, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Important language missing 

message: Is 'Peerapper' a real language? It's on the list...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Toomanycupcakes (talk • contribs) 22:19, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. The spelling dates from the time when English speakers were generally monolingual and chose spellings that made sense in English, regardless of whether they looked silly.  If Australia was just being Anglicized now you probably wouldnt see a lot of place names like Woolloomooloo.  Also rap music wasnt very popular in the 1700s.  This is the first time I've seen the alternate spelling "Pee Rapper", though.  —Soap— 18:51, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: H, 'Peerapper' appears as a language name on the AIATSIS Map of Aboriginal Australia, edited by David Horton. As Soap says, it's a almost certainly a very poor representation of the original name, probably written down by someone who had no idea what the sounds actually were so they mapped them to the nearest equivalent in their own variety of English. There's more information about this particular variety here under North-west Tasmania.Dougg (talk) 03:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peerapper? 

message: * This is a fairly major update. I made every good faith effort to retain all the info that was on the previous version of the page before I updated it. The major change is that I added UNESCO data. I also collapsed the alphabetical subheadings into five groups(A–F, etc.), and made the tables sortable on all fields. Tweak it if you like... Possible problems include:
# There may be some formatting probs due to non-ASCII characters in language names. Sorry about that, will try to fix...
#There may be a few duplicate entries under different names (though I tried my best to catch all of those).
# There may be some unnecessary redlinks, if the target text of redlink "FOO language" actually exists in an article named FOO or "FOO dialect". From time to time I'll try to prune these.
* That's all I can think of now. Ling.Nut3 (talk) 08:48, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  much new mateial; old info preserved 

message: A lot of the major languages had no estimates for number of speakers. I extracted estimates from the WP articles.
I also removed some duplicates.
There's clearly a lot of work to be done here. There remain duplications, mainly I think because of spelling variation but also because of dialect-clusters, dialects, and established languages being treated equally. Perhaps it would be better to list these by family or cluster rather than alphabetically.
Ordinary Person (talk) 16:08, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added some numerical information, removed some duplications 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Per currently accepted definitions of Pama-Nyungan languages, I removed the phrase from notes to Kayardild language (which happens to be the only Tangkic language on this page noted as such). Although it's been proposed that Tangkic comes under Greater or Macro-Pama-Nyungan languages, these terms are not interchangeable with Pama-Nyungan. Also changed the spelling of Tangic to Tangkic since it seems more popular now. Ellpicre (talk) 04:32, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Classification of Kayardild 

message: Correct typo: change "27 tp 130" to "27 to 130" in the "Speakers" column for Jaminjung language/Djamindjung language Charlobot (talk) 08:48, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  fixed... JarrahTree 09:05, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 18 December 2020 

message: Merge 5 separate sections (A-F, G-K, L-M, N-U, W-Z) into one.
Having a sortable list like this split into arbitrary and irrelevant groups according to the first letter of the language's name is a thoughtless and harmful skeuomorphism from the limitations of dead-tree technology.
In the original context of dead-tree technology where the skeuomorphism developed,
it would've served the purpose of helping a reader who for some reason wanted to look up a specific language in the list, using its name.
But a modern reader should just use ctrl-F for that purpose anyway
-- not only because it's far faster,
but also, trying to do it the old way would lead to lots of false negatives anyway, when the name they were searching for was an alternate name for the language.
(In the dead-tree format, they would've solved this problem by including each alternate name as a separate entry in the list, with a "see MAIN-NAME" note.)
Furthermore, having this arbitrary and irrelevant split prevents modern readers from being able to use the unique new advantages of the sortable list:
quickly re-sorting by an actually interesting and relevant feature (like in this case, the number of speakers, or status).
I made the effort to reformat the list and write this note because this thoughtless cargocult-copying of harmful skeuomorphic practices like this is a general problem, far beyond the example of this one article. Kayseychow (talk) 01:43, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 13 March 2021 (Reformat to fix thoughless and harmful (half) copying of dead-tree-derived skeuomorphisms (that wouldn't even be usable in the present example anyway)) 

message: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has recently published new results of the 2021 census. To the editor(s) who want to update speaker count, you can use this citation:
* 
Cheers, sware • 🗣 • 🏲 20:56, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: A caveat: it should be noted that the Census question (as used in 2021) was: "Does (the Person) use a language other than English at home?". It is clear that this question was interpreted in different ways by different respondents, such that many of the numbers resulting are pretty meaningless. Dougg (talk) 23:38, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  2021 Census