Australian Languages
Archeological evidence indicates that Australia has been inhabited by humans for over 50,000 years. At the time of the establishment of the first British colo-ny at Port Jackson (Sydney), in 1788, there were about 250 different languages spoken on the continent. Esti-mates of the Aboriginal population at that time vary from the low figure of 300 000 to several times that number.
Over a period of a little more than 100 years, Europeans took over the whole country, killing a large proportion of the indigenous population in the process. Today only 60 or so Aboriginal languages are still spo-ken, and as few as 20 or so are likely to be spoken a generation from now. For almost all the native lan-guages, we have some record, though in some cases only a brief English– Aboriginal word list. Grammatical information is available for approximately 100 lan-guages, the bulk of it having been collected since the 1960s, in many cases from the last speakers.
Fonte: Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World, 2009 Else-vier Ltd (adapted).
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