Northern Tasmanian is an aboriginal language family of Tasmania proposed in the reconstruction of linguist Claire Bowern, grouping two extinct languages once spoken on the north-central coast of the island: the Tommeginne language and the Port Sorell language. It was spoken by the Northern tribe of Aboriginal Tasmanians before European colonization ended the unbroken transmission of Tasmanian languages in the 19th century. Bowern's Bayesian phylogenetic analysis found the two languages closely related to each other, with a possible further connection to the neighboring Western Tasmanian family.
Facts
RegionNorthern 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; only slight evidence of a distant relation between the northern and western groups survives. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Tasmanian Languages
WikipediaExternal classification, Crowley and Dixon (1981) list
Northern (T1) [N region on map]
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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