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Before European settlers arrived in Australia, Aborigines may have spoken up to 250 distinct languages, not including the different dialects. The Aboriginal groups compose their own distinct linguistic group with no close links to any mainland Southeast Asian group. Most Aboriginal languages belong to the language family classified as Australian. The largest group within this family is Pamanyungan. In the past, neighbouring Aboriginal groups could generally communicate well with each other and many other people were multilingual. In some cases many groups living across a vast range of territory all spoke dialects of one language, although two groups at each end of such a range might find little similarity between their languages.
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