The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs also wiped out all songbirds, except for in (ark) Australia. Australian songbirds then spread out to rest of the planet.
The closest living descendents (aka basal lineages) are the Lyrebird and the Rufus scrub bird. The lyrebird’s song is a mixture of its own song and other birds songs. They have been also been known to mimic chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and human speech.



I mean not to nitpick but there are (were?) hundreds of aboriginal languages, none of which were related to the colonialist accent. And they were there for like thousands of years. So like fuck these birds if they’re speaking English tbh