This masterclass will offer participants an introduction to current approaches to historical lexicography, in the first instance showing how lexicographers make use of linguistic research, corpus evidence, and emerging technologies to document the rapidly changing lexicon of English. Through practical examples and exercises from the Oxford English Dictionary, International Visiting Fellow Danica Salazar will demonstrate the use of traditional print sources, language corpora, online text databases, social media, and AI tools in supporting evidence-based decisions in all stages of the editorial process—from identifying and assessing new lexical items for inclusion in the dictionary, to drafting definitions, selecting illustrative quotations, and updating existing entries to reflect contemporary usage.

Salazar will also address the challenges and opportunities presented by World Englishes, with a particular focus on Australian English and Aboriginal English. Participants will learn about incorporating data from under-documented varieties, evaluating new sources of textual evidence, and ensuring that dictionaries remain inclusive, relevant, and responsive to language as it is used around the world.

Amanda Laugesen and Adam Smith will then provide perspectives on documenting Australian English, and Jane Simpson and Madeleine Clews will offer case studies on the challenge of incorporating old sources into modern dictionaries of Indigenous languages—whether still spoken or being revived—and Australian English. The masterclass will conclude with an expert panel discussion on the future of lexicography in the Australasian region.

Transitioning from a PhD student to an independent researcher is a critical yet often uncertain stage in an academic career. Building a career in an increasingly competitive academic environment can be particularly challenging for PhD students and early career researchers, especially those conducting research individually without the support of an established team.

This interactive master class will discuss practical strategies and tips to help participants prepare for this transition. Senior researchers are warmly invited to share their experiences and perspectives as well.

AI is often framed as a technical problem. This masterclass argues that it is fundamentally a linguistic one. Large Language Models are built on language: they learn from linguistic data, operate through probabilistic predictions of text, and interact with users via natural language interfaces. Yet language is not neutral. It encodes social hierarchies, cultural norms, and power relations, all of which are reproduced (and amplified) by AI systems. At the same time, AI systems mimic human conversational behaviour, creating a powerful illusion of understanding. Users interpret fluency as competence and coherence as truth, even when outputs are inaccurate or fabricated. This raises fundamental questions about trust, authority, and the source of knowledge. Dominant narratives such as the claim that AI is a “a calculator for words” obscure these issues. They downplay the ethical, epistemological, and sociolinguistic consequences of widespread AI adoption. This masterclass reframes AI through a linguistics lens, equipping participants to critically engage with how these systems work, how they are used, and whose ways of being and voices they privilege or exclude.

Despite this, the role of language in shaping how AI works, how it is used, and what it means remains critically underexplored in both public and academic discussions – particularly (and perhaps surprisingly) in the field of linguistics. This masterclass addresses that gap by placing language at the centre of AI, equipping participants with the conceptual tools needed to critically understand, evaluate, and engage with these technologies.

Topics include:

• Why AI is not a calculator: epistemological and ethical implications;
• Human–AI interaction: conversational norms, trust, and perceived intelligence;
• Linguistic bias: standardisation, exclusion, and the dominance of mainstream language;
• Language, power, and inequality in AI systems;
• Implications for linguistics, education, and public discourse.

Bayesian phylogenetic methods, borrowed from evolutionary biology, are now widely used to study language evolution and human prehistory, yet they remain inaccessible to many language researchers due to their technical complexity. This masterclass addresses that gap through a combination of lectures, discussion, and hands-on exercises covering dataset construction, network visualisation (e.g. NeighborNet), Bayesian tree inference (e.g. BEAST2), and trait evolution modelling (e.g. BayesTraits, R). Participants will leave with practical skills and the critical grounding to apply and evaluate phylogenetic results in their own research.

This three hour masterclass introduces multimodal ethnography as a set of methods for linguists who want to analyze language in relation to embodiment, interaction, and the material organization of social life. It is designed for researchers interested in how talk is coordinated with gaze, gesture, posture, movement, objects, and space in naturally occurring settings, and in what follows analytically when speech is studied within that broader field of action.

The session focuses on how multimodal approaches can enrich linguistic research on interaction, phonetic detail, prosody, stance, turn taking, participation, and the situated production of social meaning. Participants will be introduced to some principles in multimodal interaction research and to practical strategies for bringing these into ethnographic and linguistically oriented projects. Topics include video-based field recording, transcription of embodied conduct, analytic segmentation of recorded events, and the relation between close analysis and longer term ethnographic immersion.

Attention will also be given to issues central to linguistic research, but often left outside the scope of narrower approaches to language: how speech is coordinated with bodily conduct, how material environments and spatial arrangements enter into the organization of action, and how interaction is organized in multispecies settings. The masterclass provides participants with a methodological framework for incorporating multimodal analysis into linguistic research.

The aim of this masterclass is to guide participants through the creation of high-quality, FAIR morphological data, in the form of machine-readable collections of inflectional paradigms in the Paralex standard. These collections are of benefit to language typologists, theorists and people working on the descriptions of individual language.

The development of evidence-based research crucially hinges on the existence of high quality data. The current rise of quantitative methods in linguistics additionally requires this data to be machine-readable. In linguistic typology in general, and inflectional morphology in particular, we face problems of coverage, durability and consistency. Most of the 7000 languages of the world are still not documented electronically. This is compounded by the fact that research funding is temporary, whereas scientific data must be durable, a situation which has already led to unmaintained and lost databases. Finally, linguistic datasets require manual input, which is error prone, as the human brain tends to over-correct small discrepancies.

The Paralex standard for lexicons of paradigms describes datasets made of csv tables, and accompanied by high quality metadata. It establishes domain-specific conventions stemming from a consensus among practitioners. It imposes formal constraints to make data FAIR, while preserving enough analytic flexibility to serve the entire field. It abides by our own DeAR principles: we promote Decentralized data creation and large-scale cooperation. To ensure consistency, we advocate for Automated validation, which leverages good metadata to provide quality control. For durability, our solution relies on making websites (and other data presentations) Revisable automatically from the researcher’s data. Version 2.3 of the standard is available with its documentation (https://www.paralex-standard.org/), and datasets are archived on Zenodo.

There are relatively few opportunities for linguistics students and researchers to engage with writing systems in depth, with most degree programmes offering only limited coverage. This masterclass is designed to provide ALS attendees with a structured introduction to writing systems, particularly for those who have not had access to extended formal instruction in this area. It aims to address this gap in training while fostering further interest in a field that remains comparatively small but offers substantial opportunities for research.

This masterclass explores the diverse and evolving world of writing systems. It begins with an introduction to the independent invention of writing across multiple regions of the world, followed by an overview of typology and key terminology. It then moves to the development of orthographies, with particular attention to recently invented writing systems for Indigenous languages. It concludes with a discussion of writing system adoption and the integration of writing systems into the digital domain.

This themed session centres Australian Aboriginal English (AE), a post-invasion contact-based variety used by First Nations people in Australia. Western Australia has a long and well-established trajectory in the study of AE. This work began with Malcolm’s state-wide investigation of AE in Western Australian schools in the 1970s, which laid the descriptive foundations for understanding AE as systematic and patterned rather than deficient. Over the last decade, this work has been significantly enriched by a growing body of sociolinguistic scholarship that complements descriptive accounts of AE.

At UWA, an Australian Research Council-funded research program examined the sociolinguistic patterning of the quotative system in metropolitan AE, alongside a rich body of work on the use of yarning as a decolonial data collection method. This growing body of work has also extended into the development of inclusive technologies, including a partnership with Google. Beyond WA, AE scholarship has also shifted towards sociolinguistic inquiry, examining the enregisterment of AE features and how they are used to create First Nations characters in TV dialogue, as well as re-thinking the varieties used by Indigenous people from a repertoire perspective.

The session pursues three aims. Firstly, to socialise new perspectives on AE with the wider ALS audience and the public. Secondly, to consider what’s next in AE research: which questions remain open, and which methodological and theoretical directions are productive. Thirdly, to foster collaboration between researchers across institutions and with community members and practitioners.

This themed session sits within the field of Australian Indigenous language studies and focuses on Aboriginal travelling songs, exemplified by the most widely known travelling ceremony in Australia known by various names including Warriwarnkanya, Wanji-wanji and Laka. This ceremony crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries to be performed across roughly half the continent and is documented in legacy recordings and fieldwork over more than 170 years.

The themed session invites consideration of what is and is not a ‘travelling song’ by looking at the form, function and contexts of Warriwarnkanya and other un-restricted traveling ceremonies and songs. The session aims to develop a clearer picture of how Aboriginal travelling songs move and what they do socially and linguistically.

How do speakers in multiethnic societies navigate multiple languages in ways that reflect, reproduce, or reshape social boundaries? This session explores bilingualism as a dynamic social practice in multiethnic, multilingual contexts, where language use is closely tied to group membership, identity, and institutional structures. We distinguish here between multiethnic societies (the coexistence of multiple ethnic groups) and multicultural ones (where diversity is institutionally recognised and managed).

We also consider the role of emerging technologies such as AI, which increasingly mediate how languages are used, maintained, and accessed. In Singapore, bilingualism is widespread but institutionally structured within a state-managed multicultural framework. Census 2020 data show relatively stable use of Malay at home among residents, while the use of Mandarin and Tamil has declined more consistently. English has become increasingly dominant (48.3% in 2020, up from 32.3% in 2010).

Comparable, yet different, dynamics appear elsewhere in the region. In Australia, for example, the 2021 Census recorded 5.6 million people (22%) using a language other than English at home. These comparisons show that bilingualism is widespread, but not uniform: its use, maintenance, and value vary across social contexts.

Corpus-based research on AusE has been facilitated, over the past half century or so, by the compilation of purpose-built, readily accessible Australian corpora. The first significant corpora of AusE to appear, both comprising around one million words, were the Australian Corpus of English (ACE), designed as a parallel to the British and American ‘Brown family’ corpora, and the Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-AUS), where inclusion of spoken texts expanded the possibilities for exploring register and inter-varietal variation (e.g. Collins 2009).

In addition to these synchronic corpora, several diachronic corpora have been compiled and used, including the Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE), comprising texts of various kinds from the period 1788-1900 (see Fritz 2007), and ‘AusBrown’, covering the period from 1931 to 2006 (e.g. Collins & Yao 2020). A more specialised corpus focusing on parliamentary language is the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC), sampled across the period from 2001 to 2015 (e.g. Kruger & Smith 2018). A number of the aforementioned corpora were brought together to form the Australian National Corpus collection (Musgrave & Haugh 2020), and this suite of resources is now curated by the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA). LDaCA’s holdings include a number of more specialised corpora (e.g. the La Trobe Corpus of Spoken AusE, and corpora of Auslan).

This themed session will build on and extend the existing tradition of synchronic and diachronic corpus-based research on Australian English (AusE). We welcome papers that fill gaps in the corpus coverage of AusE, including those that address such topics as the current state of play and future directions and/or present information on corpus-related projects, and those that use data derived from established and/or newly created corpora to examine linguistic aspects of AusE (syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological, pragmatic or historical) or sociolinguistic aspects (considering differences of gender, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or region as well as social networks). Contributions may explore aspects of variation and change either within AusE or in comparison with other World Englishes. Papers are also welcome on studies that make use of less conventional corpus-like ‘fuzzy sets’ of data, such as survey data or curated collections of historical correspondence. The session will incorporate a moderated panel discussion about changing corpus materials and methods.

We anticipate that this themed session will provide insights into the progression of AusE towards linguistic independence as a World English, and how it is diversifying under the forces of ever-shifting sociodemographics and modes of communication. The research presented will canvas the range and potential of existing AusE corpora, and give direction and inspiration to further research and corpus-building projects.

Publication bias pressures academics to focus on reporting positive findings, while negative, null or indeterminate results increasingly remain sidelined. This leads to the phenomenon known as the ‘file drawer problem’ (coined by Rosenthal, 1979) and refers to the major issue in academia that so much important research sits unpublished in file drawers. This is fundamentally anti-science (Crow et al, 2023).

Linguistics is no exception to the trend: non-positive results or indeterminate findings are routinely encountered and yet much goes unpublished. Curry et al (2025) emphasise that combatting this imbalance requires not only greater transparency, but a broader cultural shift in how research is evaluated and disseminated. Recent examples of linguistic work have made advancements explicitly off the back of non-positive results. For example, Styles & Gawne (2017) documented one of the very few non-reproduced kiki/bouba experiments, placing important constraints on the phenomenon.

This session responds to Curry et al.’s cultural shift challenge by initiating a forum for discussion and critical reflection on such findings and advocating for more transparent and robust research, and publishing practices more broadly. We encourage submissions from any subfield of linguistics that treat indeterminate, non-reproduced, null, or inconclusive results as analytically meaningful.

While Australian universities have policies for accessibility and inclusion, informed by national tertiary standards (TEQSA 2017), the services available to students and support available to staff to make learning accessible can vary across institutions (Brett & Harvey 2022). Teaching staff bear a responsibility for ensuring all students are able to engage in learning alongside their peers, and that all students can fairly engage with assessment to show proof of learning.

Within a linguistics course there are particular domains of knowledge that may present challenges for some students in our diverse cohorts and require thoughtful and creative pedagogical approaches, including (but not limited to) transcribing audio recordings, reading through descriptive grammars and corpora, and drawing syntax trees. There are some adjustments we can make to our teaching and assessment that benefit all students making our courses more inclusive and accessible in simple ways.

Abstract topics include:

• Accessibility for students with disabilities and other access needs;
• Neurodiversity and supporting student engagement across neurotypes;
• Indigenous inclusion and decolonising the curriculum;
• Ways of decreasing exclusion for students with marginalised identities;
• The challenge of balancing different accessibility needs or student needs with institutional priorities.

This session seeks to bring together current and emerging research on gesture, embodied language, sign language and related topics in multimodality. We welcome established research as well as presentations on new research directions, research design and methodological questions, and can accommodate full-length and shorter papers.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• gesture and embodied language;
• co-speech gesture in interaction;
• sign language;
• multimodality in cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and sociolinguistic perspective;
• multimodality across the lifespan;
• gesture and event structure;
• multimodality in language shift;
• community ideologies and metalanguage of multimodality;
• methodologies in multimodal research.