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How do personal pronouns help linguists distinguish Pama-Nyungan from non-Pama-Nyungan languages?

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Distinctive features of Australia's Indigenous languages — Australian Aboriginal languages A discussion of the languages of Indigenous Australians.

In the study of Australian Aboriginal languages, personal pronouns serve as a key diagnostic feature for distinguishing between the Pama-Nyungan language group and the non-Pama-Nyungan cluster.1

While Pama-Nyungan languages cover approximately 90 percent of the continent, the non-Pama-Nyungan languages are concentrated across northern Australia. Historically, these northern languages were viewed as a collection of distinct subfamilies; however, contemporary research suggests they may form a genuine genetic entity. Personal pronouns have been instrumental in this classification, as their specific forms appear to differentiate the two divisions. This linguistic evidence has been particularly significant in revising the established eastern boundary of the non-Pama-Nyungan group.1

Beyond their role in classification, personal pronouns in many Australian languages are characterized by the use of accusative suffixes to denote their function as direct objects, which contrasts with the ergative suffixes typically applied to independent nouns to identify the actor of a transitive verb.2