The Aboriginal group or groups who first entered Sahul, the name of the continent combining Australia and Papua New Guinea when sea levels were lower, spoke their own language. 

As the Aborigines spread across their new continent, new words had to be added or existing words altered to cover the new things they found. They preserved their history through song, stories and dance, but inevitably, things were lost as new experiences and ideas were added.

The very sound of language changed slowly. Part of this was due to language drift, the way language changed from one generation to the next over multiple generations, part was due to the addition of new words that were fitted in but still changed the way that people spoke.

We will never properly understand the pattern of these changes over the long millennia of Aboriginal occupation of the continent. However, linguists have developed rules to help them understand the ways in which languages might have changed.

In his work untangling the mysteries of the Anaiwan or Nganjaywana language, Terry Crowley attempted to do two things. First, he looked at the relationships between Anaiwan and the surrounding languages to define rules that might explain difference and relationships. He established that Anaiwan fitted within the general corpus of surrounding Aboriginal languages and was most closely related to the coastal languages, especially Djangadi or Dhanggati, the language of the Macleay Valley.

This left him with a second question, why did Anaiwan vary in such a way as to become an apparently different language? This problem was especially complicated because of the apparent connections between the Djangadi and the Tableands’ languages further north. 

Crowley put the problem this way: The phonological changes in Anaiwan must have taken place some considerable time ago to allow other Tablelands’ languages to add so much non-coastal material, to allow for the shifts in pronunciation.

The answer, he suggested, may have lain in the existence of a secret or mystical Anaiwan language, one independent of but parallel to the main language, that reduced the need for Anaiwan to borrow from other languages.

This secret language may well have existed, Mathews refers to it, but is not (I think) the most logical explanation. I think the answer lies in geography and the pattern of climatic change.

Jim Belshaw’s email is ndarala@optusnet.com.au. He blogs at newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com.au and newenglandhistory.blogspot.com.au