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The languages of Australia are the major historic and current languages used in Australia and its offshore islands. Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. [1] English is the majority language of Australia today.
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. [3] The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
Across the English-speaking world, they’ve become famous for their penchant for shortening words like sunglasses to sunnies, swimsuit to swimmers, afternoon to arvo – the list goes on.
The next most common languages spoken at home are Mandarin (1.7%), Italian (1.5%), and Arabic (1.4%); almost all migrants speak some English. [47] Australia has multiple sign languages, the most spoken known as Auslan, which in 2004 was the main language of about 6,500 deaf people, [48] and Australian Irish Sign Language with about 100 speakers.
The Pama–Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, [1] containing 306 out of 400 Aboriginal languages in Australia. [2] The name "Pama–Nyungan" is a merism: it is derived from the two end-points of the range, the Pama languages of northeast Australia (where the word for "man" is pama) and the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia (where the ...