ABSTRACT
We have already mentioned that Australian languages, contrary to popular belief, have extensive vocabularies, embracing terms for whatever speakers need to talk about. Unlike English, Australian languages were spoken by small groups of people, who lived their lives within relatively restricted domains – usually of the order of several thousand square kilometres – and had little experience or knowledge of the world beyond. This fact has important consequences on their vocabularies, which reflect the relatively confined environments of the speakers. Thus no Kimberley language has a word for ‘snow’, since this phenomenon does not occur naturally within the region, and in traditional times no one would have travelled anywhere where there was snow, or even heard of it. Languages such as Gooniyandi, spoken hundreds of miles inland, appear to have had no term for ‘sea’, while the languages of Dampier Land, which has no large watercourses, had no terms for ‘river’ as distinct from ‘creek’.
