Northeastern Tasmanian is an aboriginal language family of Tasmania proposed in the reconstruction of linguist Claire Bowern, covering the speech of the Northeastern, Ben Lomond and North Midland tribes of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Sources record up to four tentatively attested varieties, including Pyemmairre and the North Midland language Tyerrernotepanner, known mainly through 19th-century wordlists such as those of Lhotsky and Backhouse. Like every Tasmanian language, it went extinct in the 19th century following British colonization of the island.
Facts
RegionNortheastern 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. 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. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Tasmanian Languages
WikipediaBowern (2012) section
The Norman list is northeastern, for example, while the Lhotsky and Blackhouse lists attest to an additional language in the northeastern family
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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