Mbabaram belonged to the Southern Paman branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, spoken along the upper Walsh River in the rainforest country southwest of Cairns in north Queensland. It is remembered for one word: its term for dog was dug, all but identical to the English word — and a pure coincidence, the two languages sharing no ancestor at all.
That accident became a fixture of introductory linguistics, the standard warning that look-alike words prove nothing about how languages are related. The linguist R. M. W. Dixon drew it out of Albert Bennett over fieldwork around 1970; Bennett, the last fluent speaker, died in 1972, and the recordings sit in the AIATSIS archive in Canberra.
Worth remembering
- Its word for dog was dug, almost identical to English by sheer coincidence — a textbook caution against reading relationship into resemblance.
- R. M. W. Dixon documented it through fieldwork with Albert Bennett around 1970; the recordings are held by AIATSIS in Canberra.
Gallery
Sources
- Mbabaram, a Pama-Nyungan language of north Queensland, had the word dug for dog by coincidence with English; its last speaker, Albert Bennett, died in 1972 Wikipedia
- Mbabaram is classified as an extinct Southern Paman language Glottolog
- R. M. W. Dixon's 1966 fieldwork with Albert Bennett, published in the Bulletin of SOAS, showed that Mbabaram makes no grammatical noun-class distinctions — unlike every neighbouring language — and that its word for dog, dug, is a complete coincidence with English. Cambridge University Press / Bulletin of SOAS
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.