Australian Aboriginal languages in the context of "Nyungan languages"

In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology (as in languages such as Latin) or relational nouns (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is described as agent–object–verb (AOV) instead of subject–object–verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.

The Pama–Nyungan languages (/ˌpɑːmə ˈnjʊŋən/ PAH-mə-NYOONG-ən) are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, comprising 306 of the 400 Aboriginal languages of Australia. The name "Pama–Nyungan" is a merism: it is derived from the two end-points of the range, the Pama languages of northeast Australia (where the word for 'man' is pama) and the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia (where the word for 'man' is nyunga).

The other language families indigenous to the continent of Australia are often referred to, by exclusion, as non-Pama–Nyungan languages, though this is not a taxonomic term. The Pama–Nyungan family accounts for most of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, and the greatest number of languages. Most of the Pama–Nyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. Many languages have become extinct, and almost all remaining ones are endangered in some way. Only in the central inland portions of the continent do Pama–Nyungan languages continue to be spoken vigorously by the entire community.

The languages of Australia are the major historic and current languages used in Australia and its offshore islands. Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. English is the majority language of Australia today. Although English has no official legal status, it is the de facto official and national language. Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling.

Around 120 to 170 Indigenous languages and dialects are spoken today, but many of these are endangered. Creole languages such as Kriol and Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole) are the most widely-spoken Indigenous languages. Other distinctively Australian languages include the Australian sign language Auslan, Indigenous sign languages, and Norf'k-Pitcairn, spoken mostly on Norfolk Island.

Tiwi /ˈtiːwi/ is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by the Tiwi people on the Tiwi Islands, within sight of the coast of northern Australia. It is one of about 10% of Australian languages still being frequently learned by children.

Traditional Tiwi, spoken by people over the age of fifty by 2005, is a polysynthetic language. However, this grammatical complexity has been lost among younger generations. Tiwi has around one hundred nominals that can be incorporated into verbs, most of them quite different from the corresponding free forms. It is spoken by around 2,500 people

A voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek ἆγμα âgma 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ng in English sing as well as n before velar consonants as in English and ink. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩. The IPA symbol ⟨ŋ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ɲ⟩, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem.

While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/ as phonemes, /ŋ/ is rarer. Half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, many of them limit its occurrence to the syllable coda. The velar nasal does not occur in many of the languages of the Americas, the Middle East, or the Caucasus, but it is extremely common among Australian Aboriginal languages, languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, and Polynesian languages. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, such as most of the Romance languages, it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before velar consonants. This kind of assimilation can even be found in languages with phonemic voiced velar nasals, such as English. An example of this phenomenon is the word income; its underlying representation, /ˈɪnˌkʌm/, can be realized as either [ˈɪnˌkʌm] or [ˈɪŋˌkʌm].

Ngunnawal/Ngunawal and Gundungurra are Australian Aboriginal languages, and the traditional languages of the Ngunnawal and Gandangara. Ngunnawal and Gundungurra are very closely related and the two were most likely highly mutually intelligible. As such they can be considered dialects of a single unnamed language, but this is the technical linguistic usage of these terms and Ngunnawal and Gundungurra peoples prefer to describe their individual varieties as separate languages in their own right.

A boomerang (/ˈbuːməræŋ/) is a thrown tool typically constructed with airfoil sections and designed to spin about an axis perpendicular to the direction of its flight, designed to return to the thrower. The origin of the word is from an Aboriginal Australian language of the Sydney region. Its original meaning, which is preserved in official competitions, refers only to returning objects, not to throwing sticks, which were also used for hunting by various peoples both in Australia and around the world. However, the term "non-returning boomerang" is also in general use. Various forms of boomerang-like designs were traditionally and in some cases are still used by some groups of Aboriginal Australians for hunting. The tools were known by various names in the many Aboriginal languages prior to colonisation. The oldest surviving Aboriginal boomerang, now held in the South Australian Museum, was found in a peat bog in South Australia, dated to 10,000 BC. Historically, boomerangs have been used for hunting, sport, and entertainment, and are made in various shapes and sizes to suit different purposes. Ancient "boomerangs", used for hunting, have also been discovered in Egypt, the Americas, and Europe, although it is unclear whether any of these were of the returning type.