Australian indigenous languages trace back to one common ancestor: study

SYDNEY, March 28 (Xinhua) -- For the first time, linguistics experts have demonstrated that all of the 250 indigenous Australian languages are derived from one single origin.

Long thought to be the case but never proven, a three-year collaboration between Australia's University of Newcastle (UON) and Western Sydney University (WSU), has at last confirmed the concept known as the Proto-Australian' language.

"We discovered that the sounds of words we compared showed recurrent systematic differences and similarities across a set of languages that are spread out in a geographically discontinuous way - which makes it very unlikely that they are the result of chance or language contact," chief investigator from WSU associate professor Robert Mailhammer told the media Wednesday.

"While a multitude of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages were spoken at the time of European settlement, the findings also imply that indigenous Australian languages only spread after the end of the last ice age, some 10-12,000 years ago."

Despite the groundbreaking new insights however, the study may raise even more questions about how the languages spread and how the linguistic findings connect to the genetic findings.

According to Mailhammer, the study shows that indigenous Australian languages were "not the likely languages spoken by the first inhabitants of Australia.

Researchers theorize that the language family spread across all of Australia most likely from a small area in Northern Australia.

"This spread is likely to have been carried out by at least some population movement whose material and genetic traces have remained somewhat elusive," historical linguist at UON associate professor Mark Harvey said.

"However, with further interdisciplinary research, this new linguistic evidence is likely to give us a more precise reconstruction of Australian prehistory from what is currently known," Harvey said. Enditem