Western Tasmanian is an aboriginal language family of Tasmania in the reconstruction of linguist Claire Bowern, spoken by the Northwestern and Southwestern tribes of Aboriginal Tasmanians along the island's western coast and northwestern corner. It is documented through three now-extinct varieties, the Northwestern or Peerapper language, the West Point language, and the Southwestern or Toogee language, and has been tentatively linked to the neighboring Northern Tasmanian family under a broader Northern-Western Tasmanian grouping.
Facts
RegionWestern 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; the western varieties are noted as especially poorly attested. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Tasmanian Languages
WikipediaBowern (2012) section
the Fisher list is western, as are the Plomley lists, though with admixture.
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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