The indigenous languages of Australia are particularly remarkable for their rather shared pattern of sounds. With generally not more than three or five vowels which may or may not be contrasted by length, and sharing many places of articulation for their consonants, these sounds have come to generally define what the indigenous languages of Australia sound like. However, there are some notable languages, and even groups of languages, which have broken the mold, and deviate from this pattern of sounds.

Among the phonologies of Australia’s indigenous languages, one notable general pattern you could find is the lack of fricative sounds, including the sound /h/. But before going into these details, we must first define what a fricative is. To start, try making the sounds /s/, /z/, /f/, and /v/. Do you spot anything in common?

Do you hear some form of turbulence in these sounds? This is called frication, which is created by passing air through a narrow channel formed by two given articulators. For example, the /f/ and /v/ sounds are created by channeling air through a narrow channel created by the upper teeth and lower lip, and hence these two sounds are referred to as labiodental fricatives (lip-teeth fricatives).

A special class of fricative sounds you would normally encounter is the sibilant. This includes the /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ sounds found in languages across the world. These sounds are normally formed by passing air through a narrow channel like you would with any fricative, but the tongue is also involved in channeling the air as well, by curving in such a way that air is directed over the teeth.

In much of Australia’s indigenous languages, these sounds are seemingly absent, especially the sibilants. But alas, there are some exceptions to the apparent norm, and according to Claire Bowern, a renowned linguist specialising in the indigenous languages of Australia, these are more or less clustered in Queensland, with some cases present in Northern Territory, and a couple in Western Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria, with only one in South Australia.

North Cape York Paman Languages

Firstly, let us look at the languages of the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia. On this tip of Australia, there is an entire branch of Pama-Nyungan languages, consisting around 40 languages in total, which are documented to have fricative consonants. This branch is called the North Cape York Paman languages, which consists of three smaller subdivisions, the Northern Paman languages, the Umpila language, and the Wik languages. Today, the Northern Paman languages are entirely extinct, as with some of the Wik languages.

It is this extinct branch of the North Cape York Paman languages that have the languages containing fricative consonants, with the Wik and Umpila languages generally lacking them, and only some Wik languages containing some allophonic variation featuring fricative sounds. Looking around the phonologies of the Northern Paman languages, there seems to be a distinct pattern of the type of fricative consonants present in the languages that have them. They are almost always the voiced bilabial fricative consonant /β/, the voiced velar fricative consonant /ɣ/, and the voiced dental fricative consonant /ð/.

According to Kenneth Hale, these fricatives could have developed through the lenition of stop consonants facilitated by the long vowel preceding the lenited consonant. This process thus produced the voiced fricative consonants, with Hale raising the following examples from the proto-Paman reconstructions and Uradhi:

*pi.pa -> iβa (father’s younger brother)

*pi.ku -> wiɣu (rib)

*wa.tʲa -> waða (crow)

He noted that these changes pertained to the bilabial, dental, and velar consonants, proposing that */p, mp/ became /β/, */tʲ, nʲtʲ/ became /ð/, and */k, ŋk/ became /ɣ/. With this in mind, let us look at other examples of Australian languages with fricatives, and see if this pattern of fricative consonants holds in these languages.

Western Daly Languages

Moving to the Daly River region of Northern Territory, we have the Western Daly language family, a small language family consisting of three languages, two of which have fricative consonants. These are the Marri Ngarr and the Marrithiyel languages

The main resources outlining Marrithiyel’s phonology are written by Ian Green, which mentioned that Marrithiyel contains two rather unusual fricative consonants. These are the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, and the voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. Marri Ngarr, on the other hand, has four fricative consonants, with a compilation of recordings and field notes available through the Daly Languages (Australia) website. These are the voiced dental fricative /β/, the voiced retroflex fricative /ʐ/, the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/, and the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/. Additionally, some more fricatives may be realised through allophonic variation, such as /p/ occurring as [ɸ], /c/ occurring as [ʒ], and /t̪/ occurring as [ð].

Though not part of the Western Daly languages, the Ngan’gi language, or Ngan’gityemerri, a member of the Southern Daly language family, is attested to have one fricative consonant for each of its places of articulation. There is the bilabial (lips) fricative /ɸ/, the retroflex fricative /ʐ/, the laminal fricative /ɕ/, and the velar fricative /ɣ/. It does exhibit some allophonic variation with other sounds, but there is phonemic distinction between the fricatives and other sounds.

With the differing emergence of fricative consonants in this group of languages, we might expect the evolution of fricative consonants in the languages of the Daly River region to feature multiple independent events. We do not exactly have much information on how these consonants evolved or developed in the languages of the Daly River region though, and it might be worth investigating or comparing against the evolution of fricatives in the Pama-Nyungan languages that contain them to identify similarities and differences in these patterns.

Languages with allophonic variations

The Adnyamathanha language belongs to the Thura-Yura branch of the Pama-Nyungan languages, and is spoken in the Flinders Rangers region of South Australia. Within its phonological inventory, it contains one fricative consonant, /v/. According to this lesson by the Mobile Language Team, this sound is heard in words such as ‘no good’, virdni. However, this course also notes that the /v/ sound could sound closer to a /β/ instead. There is also a claim that /v/ is an allophone of /p/, but I am unable to verify it with the resources I have access to.

Secondly, there is also the Dalabon language spoken in Arnhem Land in Northern Territory. It is classified as a Gunwinyguan language with no clear evidence for or against the presence of dialectal variation. Here, the fricative in question is the /h/ sound, transcribed as ‘H’. There is also a glottal stop in the Dalabon language, transcribed using the letter ‘h’. According to the First Dictionary of Dalabon, the syllable structure suggested could include CV(L)(N)(h), where L is a liquid consonant like ‘r’, N is a nasal consonant like ‘n’, and h is a glottal consonant like ‘H’. One example of its use in the Dalabon language is the word ‘to climb’, kalngHmû [kalŋhmɨ]. However, like the Adnyamathanha language, the phonemic status of the /h/ sound is under question, but I am unable to verify the evidence for or against it.

Lastly, there is the Murrinh-patha language, which has been proposed to be a member of the Southern Daly language family spoken in the Daly River region in Northern Territory. Here, there is a proposed allophonic variation which features fricative consonants by John Mansfield documented in a PhD dissertation. The /g/ sound may be realised as a [ɣ] sound, that is, a voiced velar fricative consonant, and the /d̪/ sound, a dental ‘d’ sound, may be realised as a [ð] sound, a voiced dental fricative consonant.

Kala Lagaw Ya

Spoken in the Torres Strait Islands, we have the Kala Lagaw Ya language, classified as an isolate branch in the Pama-Nyungan language family. As we have introduced before, the Kala Lagaw Ya is the only indigenous language of Australia which has the consonant sounds /s/ and /z/, but there is an important asterisk worth mentioning here. These sounds exhibit allophonic variations with the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ sounds, which do sound similar to the /c/ and /ɟ/ sounds, but the latter are more palatal in articulation.

It is unclear to what extent these sibilants are borrowed from the Papuan languages, or are innovated by the speakers. But as most other Pama-Nyungan languages lack these sounds, going by maximum parsimony, one would be inclined to deduce that the common ancestor of all Pama-Nyungan languages likely did not have the /s/ and /z/ sounds, and that these sounds appeared in Kala Lagaw Ya over time.

However, the Aboriginal Australian languages are not the only group of languages in the world that lack these particular sounds, especially the sibilants. Some Austronesian languages like Māori and Hawaiian also lack the /s/ and /z/ sounds, with Kiribati even lacking fricatives altogether. Similarly, Tamil traditionally lacks fricative consonants, with most of the fricative sounds entering the language through loanwords.

Now that we have seen the exceptions to the general pattern that indigenous Australian languages lack fricative consonants, we can start to piece together and examine the arguments made by the linguist Andrew Butcher, especially when it comes to examining the role of otitis media in the phonologies of indigenous Australian languages.

Further reading

Coulthard, T. & Coulthard, J. (2020) ‘Adnyamathanha: A Culture Guide and Language Book’, Iga Warta. ISBN 978-0-646-82427-7.

Evans, N., Francesca M. & Maggie T. (2004) A first dictionary of Dalabon (Ngalkbon), Maningrida, Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation.

Ford, K. & Ober, D. (1991) ‘A sketch of Kalaw Kawaw Ya’, Language in Australia, pp. 118–142.

Green, I. (1981) ‘The phonology and morphology of Marrithiyel: a preliminary study’, Canberra, Australian National University. MA thesis.

Green, I. (1989) ‘Marrithiyel: a language of the Daly River region of Australia’s Northern Territory’, Canberra, Australian National University. PhD dissertation.

Hale, K. L. (1964) ‘Classification of Northern Paman Languages, Cape York Peninsula, Australia: A Research Report’, Oceanic Linguistics, 3(2), pp. 248–265. doi:10.2307/3622881.

Hale, K. L. (1976) ‘Phonological Developments in Particular Northern Paman Languages’.

Ladefoged, P. & Maddieson, I. (1996) ‘The Sounds of the World’s Languages’, Oxford, Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.

Maddieson, I. (1984) ‘Patterns of Sounds’, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-26536-3.

Mansfield, J. (2014) ‘Polysynthetic sociolinguistics: The language and culture of Murrinh-Patha youth’, Australian National University. PhD diessertation.

Ponsonnet, M. (2011) A culturally informed corpus of Dalabon, Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0008-5E9C-6. Accessed on 29 Sept 2024.

Reid, N. J. (1990) ‘Ngan’gityemerri: A Language of the Daly River Region, Northern territory of Australia’, Australian National University. Thesis.