Ad
related to: facts about australian indigenous culture and language history
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land. [75]
Dispersing across the Australian continent over time, the ancient people expanded and differentiated into distinct groups, each with its own language and culture. [56] More than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples have been identified, distinguished by names designating their ancestral languages, dialects, or distinctive speech patterns ...
Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a dialect of Australian English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) population. Australian Kriol is an English-based creole language that developed from a pidgin used in the early days of European colonisation.
Indigenous languages are divided into language groups with from ten to twenty-four language families identified. [13] It is currently estimated that up to 145 Indigenous languages remain in use, of which fewer than 20 are considered to be strong in the sense that they are still spoken by all age groups.
The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. [3] The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings.
It is believed that there were between 200 and 300 Australian Aboriginal languages at the time of first European contact, but only about 70 of these have survived and all but 20 are now endangered. An Indigenous language is the main language for 0.25% of the population. [49]
Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. [1] The National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) for 2018-19 found that more than 120 Indigenous language varieties were in use or being revived, although 70 of those in use are endangered. [23]
The ethnonym Murrgin gained currency after its extensive use in a book by the American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, [1] whose study of the Yolngu, A Black Civilization: a Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937) quickly assumed the status of an ethnographical classic, considered by R. Lauriston Sharp the "first adequately rounded out descriptive picture of an Australian Aboriginal community."