Palawa kani
Palawa kani is a constructed language created by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre as a composite Tasmanian language, based on reconstructed vocabulary from the limited accounts of the various languages once spoken by the eastern Aboriginal Tasmanians. The Centre wishes to keep the language private until it is established in the community, and claims copyright. However, languages are not copyrightable under Australian or international law.
Background
The Tasmanian languages were decimated after the British colonisation of Tasmania and the Black War. The last native speaker of any of the languages, Fanny Cochrane Smith, died in 1905.In 1972, Robert M. W. Dixon and Terry Crowley investigated reconstructing the Tasmanian languages from existing records, in a project funded by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. This included interviewing two granddaughters of Fanny Cochrane Smith, who provided "five words, one sentence, and a short song". They were able to find "virtually no data on the grammar and no s" and stated "it is impossible to say very much of linguistic interest about the Tasmanian languages", and they did not proceed with the project.
In the late twentieth century, as part of community efforts to retrieve as much of the original Tasmanian culture as possible, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre attempted to reconstruct a language for the indigenous community. Due to the scarcity of records, Palawa kani was constructed as a composite of several of the estimated dozen original Palawa languages.
State of the language
Palawa kani was developed in the 1990s by the language program of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe.The Centre wishes to maintain community ownership of the language until the community is familiar and competent with it.
The language project is entirely community-based and the language is not taught in state schools but at various after-school events, organised camps and trips. There is obvious enthusiasm for the language, especially among younger people, and an increasing number of people are able to use the language to some extent, some to great fluency, though the Centre requests that non-Aboriginals wanting to use the language first make a formal application to the Centre.
The animated television series Little J & Big Cuz was the first television show to feature an episode entirely in Palawa kani, which was broadcast on the NITV network in 2017. Lutana Spotswood gave a eulogy in Palawa kani at the funeral of the Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon. In 2018, The Nightingale became the first major film to feature Palawa kani, with consultation from aboriginal Tasmanian leaders. Palawa kani is also used on a number of signs in Protected areas of Tasmania, for example kunanyi has been accepted as an official name for Mount Wellington, and what was formerly known as Asbestos Range National Park is now known as Narawntapu National Park.
Official place names
Palawa kani has been formally legitimated through the Tasmanian governmental Aboriginal and Dual Naming Policy of 2013, which "allows for an Aboriginal and an introduced name to be used together as the official name and for new landmarks to be named according to their Aboriginal heritage." These include kanamaluka / Tamar River and kunanyi / Mount Wellington.A number of other Palawa-kani place names exist, but are not in official use. Some are modern descriptive names rather than historically attested.
Phonology
The vowels are a i u and the diphthong ay and uy.| m | n | ny | ng | |
| p | th | t | tj | k |
| r, l | ly | |||
| w | y |
Consonant clusters include pr, tr and kr.
Like most mainland languages, Tasmanian languages lacked sibilants, and this is reflected in Palawa kani.
The pronunciation of Palawa kani may reflect those words preserved in the now English-speaking Palawa community, but does not reflect how the original Tasmanian words were likely to have been pronounced. Taylor states that "the persons who contributed to the project would appear to have uncritically accepted phonological features of the Australian Mainland languages as a guide to Palawa phonology without
undertaking an adequate comparative analysis of the orthographies used by the European recorders", and gives four examples:
- In transcriptions with consonant + 'y', the 'y' is taken to be the vowel i or ay despite Milligan's statement that it was a 'y'-like sound. In word-final position, 'y' did not indicate a vowel, as Palawa kani assumes, but rather forms a digraph for one of the consonants ty, ny, ly, etc.
- The sequence 'tr' is treated as a consonant cluster, when it was presumably a postalveolar affricate closer to English j or ch.
- 'r' transcribed before a consonant or at the end of a word is taken to indicate a long vowel or the kind of vowel quality found in modern Australian English words with such spellings, but the English-speaking transcribers of Tasmanian spoke rhotic dialects of English, while others spoke Danish or French, and apparently the r's were to be pronounced.
- All Palawa-kani words must end in a vowel, and it is assumed that in Tasmanian words transcribed without a final vowel, that vowel was overlooked. However, there is good reason to think that many Tasmanian words actually did end in a consonant. In this they differed from many Mainland languages.
Grammar
Virtually no grammatical information has been preserved from the original Tasmanian languages. The only running 'text' is a sermon preached by George Robinson on Bruny Island in 1829, after being on the island for only eight weeks. His "Tasmanian" was actually English replaced word-for-word with Tasmanian words that had been stripped of their grammar, much as occurs in a contact pidgin. Robinson is one of the principal primary sources for Palawa kani.
Pronouns
There are two sets of pronouns,| sg | pl | |
| 1 | mina | waranta |
| 2 | nina | waranta |
| 3 | nina | nara |
mapali 'many' may be added to e.g. nara 'they'.
| sg | pl | |
| 1 | mana | mana |
| 2 | nanya | mana |
| 3 | nanya | nika |
mapali 'many' may be used to distinguish mana 'my' from mana-mapali 'our, your'.
nika also means 'this', as in milaythina nika 'their lands / this land'.
Numbers
The numerals are,| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| pama | paya | luwa | wulya | mara | nana | tura | pula | tali | kati |
These are conjoined for pamakati 11, payakati 12, etc.
For the decades, -ka is added to the digit, for payaka 20, luwaka 30, etc. For the hundreds and thousands, -ki and -ku are added, for pamaki 100, maraki 500, pamaku 1000, taliku 9000, etc.
Sample text
This sample is a eulogy by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Language Program first used at the 2004 anniversary of the Risdon Cove massacre of 1804.| ya pulingina milaythina mana-mapali-tu | Greetings to all of you here on our land |
| mumirimina laykara milaythina mulaka tara | It was here that the Mumirima people hunted kangaroo all over their lands |
| raytji mulaka mumirimina | It was here that the white men hunted the Mumirimina |
| mumirimina-mapali krakapaka laykara | Many Mumirimina died as they ran |
| krakapaka milaythina nika-ta | Died here on their lands |
| waranta takara milaythina nara takara | We walk where they once walked |
| waranta putiya nayri | And their absence saddens us |
| nara laymi krakapaka waranta-tu manta waranta tunapri nara. | But they will never be dead for us as long as we remember them. |
Other versions are available, including one with a sound recording.