palawa kani

[2][6][4][7] The centre wishes to restrict the availability of the language until it is established in the Aboriginal Tasmanian community and claims copyright.

[9][10] However, the declaration is legally non-binding and languages cannot receive copyright protection in many countries, including Australia and the United States.

[15] In 1972, Robert M. W. Dixon and Terry Crowley investigated reconstructing the Tasmanian languages from existing records, in a project funded by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

This included interviewing two granddaughters of Fanny Cochrane Smith, who provided "five words, one sentence, and a short song".

They were able to find "virtually no data on the grammar and no running texts" and stated "it is impossible to say very much of linguistic interest about the Tasmanian languages", and they did not proceed with the project.

Due to the scarcity of records, palawa kani was constructed as a composite of several of the estimated dozen original Tasmanian languages.

[2] The two primary sources of lexical and linguistic material are Brian Plomley's 1976 word lists and Crowley and Dixon's 1981 chapter on Tasmanian.

Allowing for the distortions that occurred when linguistically naive Europeans tried recording Tasmanian words, the centre reconstructs the name as nipaluna.

[7] Palawa kani was developed in the 1990s by the language program of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe.

[27][28] The Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania also has changed the 44 Aboriginal and dual names as having an upper-case first letter.

Taylor (2006) states that "the persons who contributed to the project would appear to have uncritically accepted phonological features of the Australian Mainland languages as a guide to palawa phonology without undertaking an adequate comparative analysis of the orthographies used by the European recorders", and gives three examples:[30] The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has decided that palawa kani should only be written in lowercase letters.

This sample is a eulogy by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Language Program first used at the 2004 anniversary of the Risdon Cove massacre of 1804.