Palawa kani is a constructed language created by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre as a composite Tasmanian language, based on reconstructed vocabulary from the limited accounts of the various languages once spoken by the Aboriginal people of what is now Tasmania (palawa kani: Lutruwita). The centre wishes to restrict the availability of the language until it is established in the Aboriginal Tasmanian community and claims copyright. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is used to support this claim to copyright as it declares that indigenous people have the right to control their "cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions" and that states must "recognise and protect the exercise of these rights". However, the declaration is legally non-binding and languages cannot receive copyright protection in many countries, including Australia and the United States. The centre however provides a list of place names in palawa kani and consents to their free use by the public. Dictionaries and other copyrightable resources for learning the language are only provided to the Aboriginal community.
Background
The Tasmanian languages were exterminated after the British colonisation of Tasmania and the Black War. The last native speaker of any of the languages, Fanny Cochrane Smith, died in 1905. 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. In the late twentieth century, as part of community efforts to retrieve as much of the original Tasmanian culture as possible, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre attempted to reconstruct a language for the indigenous community. Due to the scarcity of records, palawa kani was constructed as a composite of several of the estimated dozen original Tasmanian languages.
Sources 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. These are supplemented by archival research. The source languages are those of the Northeastern Tasmanian and Eastern Tasmanian language families, as these are ancestral to the modern palawa population as well as being the best attested Tasmanian languages. However, most place names are reconstructed using languages spoken around the locality as sources. Usually a single Tasmanian word is chosen for an English concept, but occasional duplicates occur, such as palawa and pakana, which come from different languages and both mean '(Tasmanian) person'. The words need to be reconstructed from the English pronunciation spellings that they were recorded in. For example, in 1830 the local name for Hobart was recorded as nib.ber.loon.ne and niberlooner. Allowing for the distortions that occurred when linguistically untrained Europeans tried recording Tasmanian words, the centre reconstructs the name as nipaluna.
State of the language The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre began developing palawa kani in the 1990s, with key leaders of the process including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe. The centre wishes to maintain control over the language until the Aboriginal community is familiar and competent with it. The language is only taught by community organisations and not by state schools. Since the language was constructed, an increasing number of people are able to use the language to some extent, some to great fluency. However, the centre requests that non-Aboriginals wanting to use the language first make a formal application to the centre. The centre rejects the classification of a "constructed language" for palawa kani. In 2012, the centre filed a request to remove the Wikipedia articles on this language on copyright grounds. However, this was refused. The animated television series Little J & Big Cuz was the first television show to feature an episode entirely in palawa kani, which was broadcast on the NITV network in 2017. In 2018, The Nightingale became the first major film to feature palawa kani, with consultation from Aboriginal Tasmanian leaders. In addition, palawa kani is used on a number of signs in protected areas of Tasmania, for example kunanyi has been gazetted as an official name for Mount Wellington, and what was formerly known as Asbestos Range National Park is now known as Narawntapu National Park.
Official place names
The Tasmanian governmental Aboriginal and Dual Naming Policy of 2013 has formally legitimated palawa kani, allowing for "an Aboriginal and an introduced name to be used together as the official name and for new landmarks to be named according to their Aboriginal heritage". These include kanamaluka / Tamar River and kunanyi / Mount Wellington. Where no historical recorded name can be found, the policy allows for newly created names to be recognised as official. A number of other palawa kani place names exist, but are not in official use. At the end of 2024 the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) requested the Tasmanian government change thirteen gazetted Aboriginal place names written in the reconstructed palawa kani language, with the change being having the first letter changed from lower-case to upper-case. A palawa kani language coordinator said this was a result of the evolution of the use of the language in the community with most Aboriginal people now using this format, and the lower-case to upper-case change mirrored changes in some mainland Aboriginal languages. Some of the thirteen Aboriginal place names were Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Takayna/Tarkine, Yingina/Great Lake and Truwana/Cape Barren Island. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) website states that 'initial capital letters for place names are now standard practice' and their interactive map has over 200 places names with an upper-case first letter. The Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania also has changed the 44 Aboriginal and dual names as having an upper-case first letter.
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