Interactive Maps of Indigenous Australia

The Map of Indigenous Australia is an interactive map showing the languages and / or the nation groups of Aboriginal Australia. It shows the general locations of the larger groupings of indigenous people. These may include clans, dialects or individual languages in a group.

The map was created by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The borders on the map are purposefully blurred to reflect that the territories don't have defined boundaries. Some of the information on the map is also contested and may not represent the views of some of the indigenous groups represented on the map.

The languages of nation groups can be seen in place names across Australia.Both human settlements and natural landmarks, such as mountains and rivers, have been given names from over 200 different distinct indigenous languages.

The Land is a Map - Place Names of Indigenous Australian Origin is an interactive map which uses colored markers to show the typology of places with names of Indigenous Australian origin. If you select a marker on the map you can view the place name for the location and click through to learn more about the name's etymology from its Wikipedia entry.

 

You can learn more about the different languages of indigenous Australia on the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' interactive map Austlang.This map provides a guide to indigenous languages and where they were spoken. 

The 50 Words Project is another indigenous language, map which allows you to listen to and learn words in more than 60 Australian Aboriginal languages. The map, created by the University of Melbourne's Research Unit for Indigenous Language, includes sound recordings of First Nations languages from across the Australian continent.

On the 50 Words Project interactive map the 60 First Nations languages for which the project has sound recordings have brown labels. Click on a brown labelled language and you can listen to actual sound recordings of 50 different words spoken in the selected language.