R. M. W. Dixon described his hunt for a native speaker of Mbabaram in his book Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker.

Mbabaram would have originally had simply three vowels, /i a u/, like most Australian languages, but several changes occurred to add /ɛ ɨ ɔ/ to the system: The first consonant of each word was then dropped, leaving the distribution of /ɔ ɛ ɨ/ unpredictable.

When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog".

The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years.

This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.