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The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise up to 27 language families and isolates, spoken by the Aboriginal people of the Australian mainland and a few nearby islands. The relationships between these languages are not clear at present. Despite this uncertainty the indigenous languages of Australia are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages".〔Dixon 1989: 253-254〕 By convention these do not include the languages of Tasmania or the eastern Torres Strait language Meriam Mer. In the late 18th century, there were between 350 and 750 distinct Aboriginal social groupings, and a similar number of languages or dialects.〔Walsh 1991:___〕 At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Indigenous languages remain in daily use,〔Dalby 1998: 43〕 and all except roughly 20 are highly endangered. Of those that survive, only 10% are being learned by children and those languages are usually located in the most isolated areas. For example, of the 5 least endangered Western Australian Aboriginal languages, 4 belong to the Ngaanyatjarra grouping of the Central and Great Victoria Desert. Yolŋu languages from north-east Arnhem Land are also currently learned by children. Bilingual education is being used successfully in some communities. Seven of the most widely spoken Australian languages, such as Warlpiri and Tiwi, retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers.〔UNESCO atlas (online)〕 Some Aboriginal communities and linguists show support for learning programs either for language revival proper or for only "post-vernacular maintenance" (teaching Indigenous Australians some words and concepts related to the lost language).〔Zuckerman 2009〕 The Tasmanian people were nearly eradicated early in Australia's colonial history, and their languages were lost before much was recorded. Tasmania was separated from the mainland at the end of the last ice age, and Tasmanian Aboriginal people apparently remained isolated from the outside world for around 10,000 years. Too little is known of their languages for classification, though they seem to have had phonological similarities with languages of the mainland. ==Common features== Whether it is due to genetic unity or some other factor such as occasional contact, typologically the Australian languages form a language area or ''Sprachbund'', sharing much of their vocabulary and many distinctive phonological features across the entire continent. A common feature of many Australian languages is that they display so-called mother-in-law languages, special speech registers used only in the presence of certain close relatives. These registers share the phonology and grammar of the standard language, but the lexicon is different and usually very restricted. There are also commonly speech taboos during extended periods of mourning or initiation that have led to numerous Aboriginal sign languages. For morphosyntactic alignment, many Australian languages have ergative–absolutive case systems. These are typically split systems; a widespread pattern is for pronouns (or first and second person) to have nominative–accusative case marking and for third person to be ergative–absolutive, though splits between animate and inanimate are also found. In some languages the persons in between the accusative and ergative inflections (such as second person, or third-person human) may be tripartite: that is, marked overtly as either ergative or accusative in transitive clauses, but not marked as either in intransitive clauses. There are also a few languages which employ only nominative–accusative case marking. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Australian Aboriginal languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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