Eastern Tasmanian, also called Southeastern Tasmanian, is an aboriginal language family of Tasmania in the reconstructed classification of linguist Claire Bowern, spoken along the island's eastern coast and interior by the Oyster Bay, Big River and Bruny tribes of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Sources document four to five languages within it, grouped into an Oyster Bay or Central-Eastern branch, which included the Oyster Bay and Little Swanport languages, and a Bruny or Southeastern branch, which included the Southeast Tasmanian and Bruny Island languages. Like the island's other Tasmanian language families, it became extinct in the 19th century.
Facts
RegionEastern Tasmania, Australia 1 Speaker CountAll Tasmanian languages are extinct; the last fluent speaker, Fanny Cochrane Smith, died in 1905. Proto-Language StatusNo proto-language has been reconstructed for Tasmanian as a whole. Comparative work (Crowley and Dixon 1981; Bowern 2012) finds the surviving word lists too fragmentary to demonstrate that the Tasmanian language groups form a single family. A separate phonological reconstruction has been attempted for this branch specifically (see the Eastern Tasmanian languages article), but no shared ancestor with the other Tasmanian groups is established. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Tasmanian Languages
WikipediaLingua franca section
However, its vocabulary was evidently predominantly that of the eastern and the northeastern languages because of the dominance of those peoples on the settlements.
Lead paragraph
The languages were last used for daily communication in the 1830s, although the terminal speaker, Fanny Cochrane Smith, survived until 1905.
Bowern (2012) section, comparative vocabulary paragraph
there is no good evidence for a Tasmanian language family
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