Pama–Nyungan reconstruction

Proto-Pama–Nyungan may have been spoken as recently as about 5,000 years ago, much more recently than the 40,000 to 60,000 years Indigenous Australians are believed to have been inhabiting Australia. How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is uncertain; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another alongside culture and ritual. Given the cognatic relationships between groups, it seems that Pama-Nyungan has many of the characteristics of a sprachbund, indicating the antiquity of multiple waves of culture contact between groups Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families, just do not fit in the Pama-Nyungan family.

Vocabulary
In addition to Hale's 1982 list of words unique to Pama–Nyungan, and in addition to pronouns and case endings they reconstruct for the proto-language, Evans and McConvell report that while some of their roots are implausible, O'Grady and Tryon, nevertheless provide "hundreds of clear cognate sets with attestations throughout the Pama–Nyungan area and absent outside."

Phonology
Proto-Pama–Nyungan's phonological inventory, as reconstructed by Barry Alpher (2004), is quite similar to those of most present-day Australian languages.

Vowels
Vowel length is contrastive only in the first (i.e. stressed) syllable in a word.

Consonants
Proto-Pama–Nyungan seems to have had only one set of laminal consonants; the two contrasting sets (lamino-dental and lamino-alveopalatal or "palatal") found in some present-day languages can largely be explained as innovations resulting from conditioned sound changes.

Nevertheless, there are a small number of words where an alveopalatal stop is found where a dental would be expected, and these are written *. There is no convincing evidence, however, of an equivalent nasal * or lateral *.