Palawa kani

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 living on the island now known as Tasmania or 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) outlines that indigenous people should have the right to control their own cultural knowledge, including languages. However, languages cannot get copyright under Australian or international law. In practice, the centre only allows unrestricted outside access to place names. Dictionaries and other copyrightable resources for learning the language are only provided to the Aboriginal community. The Tasmanian languages were decimated 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.