The principal causes of difference between the dialects of these two places are, 1st, that at King George's Sound the terminating syllable of all names is dropped; and 2nd, that all verbs, with a very few exceptions, end in gur, instead of the varying termination which is given to them at Perth. Any person who can speak the Perth dialect will, by observing these two rules, be able to converse freely with the natives of King George's Sound.
From these examples it will be seen that the King George's Sound dialect is the simplest of the two; and indeed I am inclined to believe that the dialect there spoken is more simple than that in use at any other portion of the continent.
If we now proceed to Adelaide in South Australia we still find the same language spoken, but the dialect here is considerably softened; the hard g of Perth is exchanged for k, and b becomes p and w. Many of the nouns take -anga as a termination, and the verbs take -andi and -endi. This addition of soft terminations and a general sweetness of sound appear to be the peculiar characteristics of the Adelaide dialect. No large vocabulary of this language has yet been published, but one-eighth of the words known as belonging to the Perth dialect have been found also in that of Adelaide; we may therefore fairly conclude that when the latter language is better known a still greater degree of identity will be found to exist.
Natives from several parts of the Murray and Murrumbidgee and from Port Phillip have been brought into communication with natives from King George's Sound, scanty vocabularies from some of these points are also extant, and the amount of evidence thus gained clearly establishes that the several dialects are all derived from a common root.
The labours of Mr. Threlkeld in the vicinity of Hunter's River and Lake Macquarie enable us to compare the language of that portion of Australia with those of the other points which we have just considered, and the result of this comparison also shows that the languages are radically the same.
TABLES OF EXAMPLES.
The following Tables will give a sufficient number of words common to those four dialects to show the degree of similarity which exists among them.