Confirmed Plenary Speakers

Abstract

The year 2027 marks the mid-point of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages and a moment in the new era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) when we might expect multilingual large language models (LLMs) to enhance the future prospects of Australia’s Aboriginal languages. The presumed opportunity is for people to reclaim their ancestral languages with the support of chatbots that have been trained on all available content. However, LLMs perform poorly on Indigenous languages, not just because of the dearth of training data, but because oral cultures are out of view of LLMs trained on monolingual text collections. What, then, does cultural survival look like in the GenAI era? We seek nuanced answers to this question that fall between the extremes of blind acceptance and outright rejection. Key themes include: (1) relationality, where knowledge is embedded in the land and transmitted at the right time and right place to the right people, not the free-for-all assumed by GenAI; (2) hybridisation, where communicative practices may be Indigenous-western hybrids, not the pure forms found in documentary records; and (3) embodiment, where language serves local participation, and is not the information-seeking activity commonly assumed by designers of GenAI. This presentation will draw on experiences arising in collaborations with First Nations speech communities and language centres in the north and west of Australia, and shared with permission.

Ian Gumbula is a Yolŋu elder and PhD student, collaborating with Steven Bird at Charles Darwin University, supported by an ARC project "Investing in Aboriginal Languages". Ian is from the Daywurrwurr Gupapuyŋu clan from Northeast Arnhem Land. Ian is a qualified teacher and has worked extensively in education, youth work, community governance, and intercultural facilitation.

Steven Bird studies language vitality and Indigenous agency in shaping programs designed to keep languages strong. Steven is past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, co-founder of the Open Language Archives Community, lead developer of the Natural Language Toolkit, producer at LanguageParties.org, and has held academic positions at U Edinburgh, Penn, Berkeley, Melbourne, and CDU.

Abstract

What would it mean to study phonetic variation as part of the social and interactional organization of everyday life? This plenary introduces anthrophonetics, a framework for investigating how phonetic form, embodied conduct, sequential organization, and participants’ social histories are simultaneously at work in the production and interpretation of social meaning.

Why would we need a new construct when sociophonetics, the study of linguistic variation, or interactional phonetics might already do that job?

Sociophonetics, largely based on interviews and experiments, allows us precise measurement of production and perception, but provides only partial access to the moment-by-moment processes through which speakers respond to one another in the negotiation of social meaning. Interaction analysis/CA, through its commitment to sequential organization and procedural relevance, does not typically admit consideration of the histories, relationships, and social trajectories through which phonetic resources acquire significance. Long-term ethnography allows us to trace social histories and ideologies at deeper timescales, while multimodal analysis situates the voice among gaze, gesture, bodily orientation, and other forms of coordinated social action. Anthrophonetics begins from the observation that each of these fields is addressing a different facet of the same problem, and that the challenge of bringing them into a single account is itself a theoretical contribution worth making.

Australian linguists have developed an especially productive body of work for interrogating these questions, examining the interfaces among phonetic variation, interaction, social practice, and ethnographic context. Research on Australian English has linked phonetic patterning to stance, style, ethnicity, and turn organization (Kiesling 2005; Fletcher & Loakes 2006). Work on Australian Greek has shown how pitch, intensity, and duration contribute to action formation in naturally occurring interaction (Alvanoudi 2023), while recent sociolinguistic ethnographic research in an Indigenous boarding-school community connects variable production to institutional practice, linguistic repertoire, affect, and locally consequential identities (Fraiese et al. 2026). Research on Australian Indigenous languages has developed particularly rich interactional and ethnographic approaches, showing how prosody and sequential organization intersect in situated communicative events (Mushin & Gardner 2009; Gardner & Mushin 2010), and how person reference, kinship, and naming practices figure in these same events (Blythe 2009; Blythe & Mushin 2023).

I take such work as evidence for a broader analytical proposition: phonetic events are simultaneously acoustic, sequential, embodied, socially differentiated, and historically situated. When you bring all four approaches to the same events, you can analyze phonetic phenomena at multiple timescales simultaneously: the acoustic moment, the sequential unfolding, and the longer social history.

Anthrophonetics builds on the contributions of phonetics, sociophonetics, CA, and linguistic anthropology, seeking to systematize a way of studying phonetic variation in which these dimensions are treated as mutually relevant to explanation. Here I enter into conversation with Australian researchers who have already demonstrated the analytical value of working across these boundaries. In this plenary I invite you to consider what this perspective may contribute to the study of phonetic variation, social meaning, and embodied interaction, and what forms of methodological training would be required to pursue it systematically.

References

• Alvanoudi, Angeliki. 2023. “The Functions of Prosody in Action Formation in Australian Greek Talk-in-Interaction.” Languages 8(4): 256.
• Blythe, Joe. 2009. “Prosodic Person Reference in Murriny Patha Reported Interaction.” In Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Nicole Dehé, and Anne Wichmann, eds., Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics, 23–52. Emerald.
• Blythe, Joe, and Ilana Mushin. 2023. “Discourse and Social Interaction.” In Claire Bowern, ed., The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, 538–547. Oxford University Press.
• Fletcher, Janet, and Deborah Loakes. 2006. “Patterns of Rising and Falling in Australian English.” In Paul Warren and Catherine I. Watson, eds., Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 42–47. Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.
• Fraiese, Lucía, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Matt Hunt Gardner, Glenys Collard, and James Walker. 2026. “Freakin’ Swimming and Everythink: School Practices and Variable (ING) in an Australian Indigenous Boarding School.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 30(1): 15–28.
• Gardner, Rod, and Ilana Mushin. 2010. “An Introduction to ‘Studies in Australian Indigenous Conversation’.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 30(4): 393–396.
• Kiesling, Scott F. 2005. “Variation, Stance and Style: Word-Final -er, High Rising Tone, and Ethnicity in Australian English.” English World-Wide 26(1): 1–42.
• Mushin, Ilana, and Rod Gardner. 2009. “Silence Is Talk: Conversational Silence in Australian Aboriginal Talk-in-Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 41(10): 2033–2052.

Norma C. Mendoza-Denton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she founded and directs the Language, Electronic Gaming, and Interactional Technologies Lab. Trained in linguistics at Stanford University, she works in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and the study of race, gender, and media. Her research focuses on language, identity, and power, with particular attention to Latina/o youth, political discourse, and digital culture. She is the author of Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs and co-editor of Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies. She has also served as Associate Dean in UCLA’s Graduate Division and as President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association. She is currently writing a textbook on Multimodal Ethnographies.

Abstract

Lexical tone is an important phonological feature of many languages around the world, but the acquisition of lexical tone by children is much less well understood than the acquisition of consonants and vowels. Earlier studies on Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese show that children produce few tone errors by age two, well ahead of their acquisition of segments. Nevertheless, recent studies using more rigorous methods have found that tone acquisition is more protracted than previously thought. In addition, many studies have demonstrated cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual acquisition of segments, but little is known about the acquisition of lexical tone in various bilingual contexts. Tone sandhi is a robust feature of many Chinese dialects, involving higher-order, sometimes very complex, obligatory phonological alternations of lexical tone. However, children’s acquisition of complex tone sandhi remains largely unexplored. This talk will address these important issues by discussing Cantonese lexical tone acquisition in monolingual and bilingual contexts, as well as children’s acquisition of both simple and complex tone sandhi patterns in several Chinese dialects. The findings illustrate the multifaceted nature of lexical tone acquisition.

Peggy Mok is a Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, and Associate Dean (Student Affairs) at the Faculty of Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She obtained her MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently an Associate Editor of JASA Express Letters and Phonetica. She has diverse interests in phonetics, incorporating articulatory, acoustic and psycholinguistic perspectives in cross-linguistic investigations of speech production and perception. Speech acquisition in different contexts is an important theme in her research. Her projects have been supported by grants from the General Research Fund by the Research Grants Council in Hong Kong. She is also awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme in 2025/26.