A history of the early description of Australian languages

AbstractThis chapter provides an overview of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century description of Australian languages. A small minority of Australian languages were described in this pre-academic descriptive era. Most of these grammars were written by missionaries from a range of denominations. Amid widespread loss of Australian languages, the earliest missionary grammarians noted that the languages they had described were no longer being spoken. The inability to aurally distinguish Australian phonemes, coupled with the lack of any shared systematic orthographic conventions compromised early records. Phonological science in Australia lagged behind European developments. The application of the word and paradigm descriptive model was reasonably well suited to the synthetic character of Australian languages, although authors innovated common-sense descriptive responses to Australian agglutinative structure, recognizing word-internal units. The comparative reading of early sources on Australian languages evinces three discrete nineteenth-century schools of descriptive practice, each demarcated by different politically autonomous pre-federation Australian colonies.