Fricative segments are used in the very large majority of the world's languages as the basis for contrastive oppositions, though one often-cited exception to this is Hawaiian, which has no fricatives in its eight-consonant system (Hockett 1955: 98, 108). There is however one major language group in which it is rare to find fricatives at all . This is the group of languages found in Australia; of the nineteen Australian languages in Maddieson's (1984) survey of the languages of the world, fifteen have no fricatives.