is an
Australian Aboriginal Language , now extinct. It is classified as one of the
Pama-Nyungan Languages .
The last native speaker of Mbabaram was
Arthur Bennett who died in
1972 .
R. M. W. Dixon described his hunt for a native speaker of Mbabaram in his book ''Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker''. Most of what we know of the language is from Dixon's field research with Bennett.
Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its vocabulary. When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, . Dixon suspected that Bennett hadn't understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" really is , pronounced almost identically to the English word. The similarity is a complete coincidence: there is no discernable relationship between English and Mbabaram. This and other
False Cognate s are often cited as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of comparisons.
