There Is No Primitive Language
In September 2025, Pauline Hanson went on a podcast and called Indigenous Australians “the most primitive race on Earth”. They had “achieved nothing”, she said, never invented the wheel, and left “a few, you know, rock paintings”. This year the clip resurfaced and was widely condemned.
Condemnation is easy. I wanted to test the claim. I’m a linguist, so it seemed fair to check whether it survives contact with evidence.
The part that holds up
In 1788, Aboriginal technology was far simpler than Britain’s. There was no metalworking, no writing and no wheeled transport. Some popular counter-stories have overreached too. Bruce Pascoe’s claims in Dark Emu about pre-contact agriculture have been seriously challenged, most notably by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe.
That’s the point that survives. Nothing else in the claim does.
Where it falls apart
Race isn’t the explanation. Technology tracks circumstances, not biology. Sixty thousand years ago, everyone’s ancestors were using stone tools, including the ancestors of the people on the First Fleet.
Environment is. Australia had no animals that could be domesticated, and very few suitable crops. Without farming you get no food surpluses, and without surpluses you get no cities, no full-time scribes and no writing. Without draught animals, a wheel is mostly a very round rock.
“Achieved nothing” ignores the record. That record includes:
some of the earliest known open-sea crossings in human history
the oldest known ground-edge axe, a fragment from Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley, around 45,000 years old
the eel traps of Budj Bim, at least 6,600 years old and now World Heritage listed
fire management sophisticated enough that fire agencies now ask for advice
a continuous culture of at least 50,000 years, and probably more than 60,000
Then there’s my field
Linguists went looking for primitive languages over a century ago. Franz Boas looked, and so did Edward Sapir. They didn’t find any, and nobody has since. Sapir put it this way in 1921: “When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.”
Australia’s roughly 250 languages are some of the best evidence there is:
Warlpiri lets speakers arrange words in almost any order without changing who did what to whom. When the linguist Ken Hale analysed it, it forced syntactic theory to rethink what it had assumed every language does.
Guugu Yimithirr speakers locate things by compass direction rather than left and right. They’ll tell you there’s an ant on your south-west leg. It also means keeping track of north all day, in the dark and indoors. Research on this changed how scientists study language and thought.
Dyirbal has a whole separate vocabulary, the “mother-in-law language”, for use within earshot of certain relatives. Same grammar, different words, switched on by who’s in the room. Most corporate communications teams can’t manage that.
So the people with the simplest tools on the planet were speaking some of its most demanding languages. That’s exactly why tools are a poor way to measure a people.
The real loss
About 120 of those languages are still spoken in some form. Only around a dozen are still learned by children as a first language. The rest are going quiet, and with them knowledge of country, ecology and history that exists nowhere else.
That’s the real argument for teaching them. You can debate how much curriculum time they deserve, and people reasonably will. That debate doesn’t need a racial hierarchy, and the evidence doesn’t support one.
“Primitive” was never a finding. It was an assumption, and the languages disproved it.
