Most Australian Aboriginal languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, but the first Pama-Nyungan language was spoken as recently as 5000 years ago. So how did Pama-Nyungan languages spread through almost all of Australia, including most of the barren deserts? Was there some sort of conquest?

by Lithide

BullNiro

There is not consensus on this topic (and I don't have my sources handy but I will in about 14 hours) but let me give this a go:

It's thought by many that intensification of production (basically agriculture) began in Australia 4000-5000 years ago (there's not enough study done on this). With these new agricultural techniques and the technologies and tools that were used required ritual initiation and for that ritual initiation a ritual language, Pama-Nyungan, was used. So they Learnt it to engage with the new technology because it was believed to be an important part of the ritual.

It has taken western scholarship a long time to conceptualise that spirituality and and superstition were not marks of Aboriginal backwardness but actually important parts of how they knew their environment and technology.

EDIT: if you search pama-nyungan on Reddit you will get a very good ask historians thread! It has many answers.

adlerchen

Just as an FYI, Pama-Nyungan is a term of convenience to talk about a linguistic area. Like Khoisan, it isn't actually a proposed family of genetic relationships, although obviously there are genetic relationships among the varieties in question, but the work on the phylogenetic relationships for them is still very far from settled. Depending on who's work you're talking about, you can get figures between 4,000-40,000 for the guesstimated time depth for Pama-Nyungan as a collective group (so potentially as far back as when there was a land bridge between Australia and Papua New Guinea).

If you can get a copy of Bowern (Ed.), Koch (Ed.) 2004 - Australian Languages: Classification and the Comparative Method, I highly recommend that you take a look at it. Claire Bowern is herself a big name in australian indigenous phylogentics, and she has a number of pending papers that you should be on the lookout for if you're interested in the subject. Another name to go on is R. M. W. Dixon, although his work has been more focused on Dyirbal specifically, but he did write the Cambridge Language Survey for the languages of Australia.