As many of you will know, a few personnel changes are underway in the executive. After an inspiring period of leadership from Ilana Mushin as president, Ilana stepped down from that role at the end of 2022, and I have had the honour of having been elected to replace her. I hope to be able to continue the direction and energy she brought to the role. The role of Associate Secretary (responsible among other things for the newsletters) also has seen a change, with Joe Blythe moving into a different role, replaced as Associate Secretary by Zhengdao Ye (ANU), on an interim basis pending election by the membership. Following the completion of Joshua Butler’s term as Postgraduate Representative, Kate Charlwood (Melbourne) was elected to that role at the last AGM. Thanks to Ilana, Joe and Josh, and welcome to the exec Zhengdao and Kate! A number of other changes are in the offing, so watch this space.

Conference

This year’s ALS conference will be held at the University of Sydney around the end of November or beginning of December. As with last year’s conference in Melbourne, this will again dovetail with the Congress of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). Watch out for further announcements about the conference as plans develop. The 2024 conference will be held at ANU, with Ksenia Gnevsheva as chair of the organising committee. Gerry Docherty and his colleagues as Griffith have volunteered to host the 2025 conference. Many thanks to all involved.

Conference hosting procedures for ALS have become increasingly centralized in recent years, in an ongoing process to streamline procedures and obviate the need for each year’s local organising committee to reinvent the wheel. An ALS conference organisers’ handbook is a living document that is added to and revised each year, and a new expanded version is well advanced. The Society also now has a permanent Program Committee and established conference financial procedures. Organising the conference is now very much a joint activity between the local organising committee and the Society’s Program Committee.

Society schemes

The ALS’s Mentoring Scheme is now up and running, thanks to the work of Ilana Mushin and other members. The aim of the scheme is to connect linguists who are seeking professional mentoring with experienced linguists who can provide advice and a sounding board for career development. The Scheme is open to all ALS members regardless of career stage or current employment status. We hope it will provide our members with a platform where they can work collaboratively beyond traditional academic relationships, and to foster community between linguists and language workers throughout Australia and the Pacific. Have a look at the mentoring page on the ALS website for more details and to register as a mentor or a mentee.

The Society has also introduced an accreditation scheme, through the work of members lead by Vice President Alice Gaby. It has become apparent that it would be useful for some members to be able to point to official status as a linguist conferred by the profession’s national body. The qualification of Accredited Linguist indicates that the holder has completed a course of study equivalent to a pass degree with a major in Linguistics through an ALS approved provider, OR that the holder has been able to demonstrate a sound knowledge of Linguistics at an advanced level, and has applied that knowledge competently and ethically through practice for more than three years. Holders of the qualification must agree to follow the ALS’s Code of Conduct. More details and an application portal are also on the ALS website.

Thanks to all members who contributed to work on these initiatives.

Funding

The time is approaching when the Society’s grants, scholarships and prizes schemes will be advertised. These include our Research Grants Scheme, the Jalwang Scholarship (for developing community-oriented outcomes out of research), the Gerhardt Laves Scholarship (supporting student fieldwork in Australia and the region), the Susan Kaldor Scholarship (supporting student participation in a summer school or the like), and the Michael Clyne Prize (for the best PhD thesis on immigrant bilingualism and language contact).

This year we are introducing a number of new prizes, scholarships and grants. We are introducing a new prize, announced at the last AGM, for an outstanding PhD thesis in any area of linguistics, to complement the more specifically focussed Clyne Prize. The ALS executive has decided to name this new prize in honour of our late member Barb Kelly, well known for her commitment to student training. With the blessing of Barb’s husband, this will be known as the Barb Kelly Prize.

Under a publication support scheme the Society is offering two grants of up to $2500 each to assist with publication costs. Various costs will be considered, but a priority will be given to fees for making publications open access. Many universities now have agreements with publishers to allow staff and students to make their publications open access, but the publishers involved vary from institution to institution, and not all linguists are associated with an institution that has an arrangement of that sort.

I strongly urge members to give some thought to applying for these various existing and new schemes, and look out for an announcement on the ALS website and an email out announcing the schemes’ opening for applications. (Our Indigenous Conference Travel and Student Conference Travel schemes will be advertised later in the year as the ALS conference approaches.)

Donations

Over the last few years ALS has expanded the range of support schemes it offers members, and we have had a number of enquiries from members about ways of contributing to some of these schemes through donations. We have now decided to provide the members with an opportunity to donate to two specific schemes: the Barb Kelly Prize for an outstanding PhD thesis, and the Jalwang Scholarship for developing community-oriented outcomes out of research. The executive is in the process of applying for charitable status to allow donations to ALS to be tax deductable, and we anticipate this will take effect later in the year. For now, members are welcome to donate to either of these schemes by emailing the treasurer Rob Mailhammer at finance@als.asn.au.

Advocacy

In response to Minister Robert’s veto of 6 ARC grants in 2022, late last year ALS under Ilana’s lead joined with ALAA, ALTAANZ, ASSTA and LCNAU to make a joint submission to Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee on an amendment to the ARC to ensure research independence.

Advocacy around the issue of the use of indistinct covert recordings in the court system has taken some steps forward. Since ALS-supported 2017 call to action on this important issue, Helen Fraser and the University of Melbourne’s Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence has advocated for a review and reform of the legal handling of indistinct covert recordings. In October, an expert group of judicial officers, legal scholars and linguists from Australia and the UK agreed that Australian courts should not use transcripts by ‘ad hoc experts’, and that all indistinct audio admitted as evidence should be accompanied by a reliable transcript produced via accountable, evidence-based methods designed and managed by forensic linguists. The expert group committed to work towards reform during 2023, and in February Helen presented to the Victoria Supreme Court’s Forensic Evidence Working Group. To assist in developing evidence-based methods, the Research Hub is working with University of Melbourne's Data Analytics Platform to develop infrastructure for easier deployment of transcription experiments and analysis of results. (See https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/language-forensics/news).

Bill Palmer

News from UWA

Welcome

Welcome to Dr Jess Kruk (PhD Monash University) who has recently joined UWA’s School of Social Sciences as Lecturer in the Indonesian Program. In addition to her role as Lecturer in Indonesian, Jess is also a linguist. She is our newest Language Lab member and has been attending meetings and providing her expertise in HDR student supervision.

Teaching roles

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway is preparing for another busy teaching semester. She will be coordinating LING 1001 Language and Communication (one of UWA’s two introductory Linguistics units) and LING 2001 Morphosyntax of the World’s Languages.

Fieldwork

Mitch Browne was on fieldwork in Tennant Creek in February 2023, reconnecting with Warlmanpa and Warumungu community members.

OZCLO

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway continues to serve as Western Australia's OzCLO chair. WA has a strong participation rate relative to its population, with 47 of the 219 teams currently registered coming from WA.

HDR Student Updates

Connor Brown has recently completed a draft of his thesis on tense and aspect semantics in Kununurra Kriol and is planning to submit the thesis later this year. Connor has also recently moved to Kununurra to take a job at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring, working on Miriwoong language revitalisation. Connor is looking forward to continuing to work with the Miriwoong community, who have contributed substantially to his thesis project.

Madeleine Clews will be presenting two papers at 7th Meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE7) conference in Brisbane in June this year. The first paper will update findings of her historical sociolinguistic analysis of 19th-century texts from the Southwest of Western Australia; the second will give a ‘work-in-progress’ overview of a preliminary survey of letters written between 1865 and 1895 from amateur botanical collectors around Australia to the Government Botanist in Melbourne, assessing the collection’s potential as a linguistic data source.

Lucía Fraiese has now received confirmation of her candidature after successfully passing all her first-year milestones. She has also recently returned to the field for more data collection.

Language Lab

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has commenced Language Lab’s consultancy with Catholic Education Western Australia to re-write resources for educators of First Nations students across the state. This work, contracted late last year, also involves the creation of e-learning modules which Celeste is working on in collaboration with Victoria-based visual media company Poncho e-learning. This consultancy is contracted for completion in December 2023.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro continues to present Language Lab on RTRFM 92.1 radio. The 2023 season launched on 23 February and will continue throughout 2023. UWA Linguistics intern Billie Pitman is this season’s production intern. https://rtrfm.com.au/tags/the-language-lab/

UWA Linguistics intern

This semester we welcome Billie Pitman (working with Celeste Rodríguez Louro in the production of Language Lab for RTRFM radio).

Visiting scholars

Professor Don Kulick (Uppsala University, Sweden and Hong Kong University) is visiting UWA Linguistics from January to March 2023. He gave an online seminar, titled ‘Exchanging languages: Explaining language shift in Papua New Guinea’.

Maïa Ponsonnet (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/UWA Adjunct) visited Perth from 21 December to 28 February 2023. Maïa spent her time in Perth working (among other things) on the ‘Domestic uses of fire in past and present Australia’, an ALS-funded project (with Luisa Miceli) and on ‘Future of Digitization’, an ARC Linkage project (with Amy Budrikis and Clint Bracknell). For the latter, she also visited the Language Centres’ teams at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring in Kununurra, and at Bundiyarra Irra Wanga in Geraldton.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

News from the University of Sydney

HDR Updates

Gus Wheeler completed and submitted his PhD thesis “A Grammar of Bru”: a comprehensive description of a Katuic language spoken in upland central Laos, with texts. (Part of Nick Enfield’s now-completed ARC Discovery Project “Do Language Boundaries Stabilize Ethnic Boundaries?”)

Weijian Meng completed and submitted his PhD thesis “A Grammar of Saek”: a comprehensive description of a Northern Tai language spoken in upland central Laos, with texts. (Part of Nick Enfield’s now-completed ARC Discovery Project “Do Language Boundaries Stabilize Ethnic Boundaries?”)

Georgia Carr completed and submitted her PhD thesis “With respect to consent: The language of sex education”. Her thesis was supervised by Jim Martin and David Rose.

New PhD student joins USYD Linguistics: Claudia Castro Acuna (topic: “Women, crime, and motherhood: women involved in crime in Chilean news discourse”, Supervised by Monika Bednarek).

Staff News

Yankee Modi and Mark W. Post were joined by Stephen Morey (LaTrobe), Kellen Parker van Dam (Zurich), Nora Muheim (Helsinki), Zilpha Modi (Rajiv Gandhi University) and Rolf Hotz (USyd) in co-organising the 4th Training and Resources for Indigenous Community Linguists (TRICL) workshop in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, India, from January 8-14, within their Firebird Foundation-funded project Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity (Eastern Himalaya). Training in basic language and culture documentation was provided to 20 participants representing 16 distinct ethnolinguistic communities across northeast India and Bhutan. Presentations were also made by 2022 awardees of five inaugural Fellowships for Indigenous Community Researchers (FLICR): Johakso Manyu (Tawrã community), Tashi Tshewang (Dakpa community), Abraham Modi (Milang community), Anu Jebisow (Hruso Aka community) and Jothisey Yobin (List community), who documented aspects of their languages and culture as diverse as tree fern and sago production, pre-Buddhist rituals, and traditional weaponry and craftsmanship. Their work will be OA archived at the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL), University of Indiana. A second cohort of FLICR fellows is now being recruited for projects in 2023.

Gwen Hyslop was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (AUD $379,876) for “Pseudo grains, new insights into early population history and adaptiveness in the Eastern Himalayas through linguistics, genetics and archaeology”. Gwen is the lead CI with co-CIs Mark Post and Yankee Modi and PIs Jade d’Alpoim Guedes and Michael Purugganan.

Sunny Boy Mahboob was invited as the Pit Corder Plenary speaker at the British Association of Applied Linguistics. A recording of his talk on 'Applying Linguistics' is available here.

Sunny Boy was invited as the first ever Global Fellow of Education at the University of St Andrews in early 2023.

Sunny Boy’s paper “World Englishes, Social Disharmonisation, and Environmental Destruction” was the most read paper across all of Routledge Handbook Series across all disciplines with close to 15,000 downloads in 2022.

Monika Bednarek delivered three conference keynotes: i) “Data-driven analysis of televisual characterisation: A corpus linguistic approach” Media Mutations 13^th Edition, University of Bologna, Italy; ii) “Language and representation in Indigenous-authored television”, 2^nd International Conference on Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series, University of Valencia, Spain; and iii) “Environmental crisis events and climate discourses on Twitter: An Australian case study”, 6^thCorpora & Discourse International Conference, University of Bologna, Italy.

Nick Enfield’s book Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press 2022) has won the 2023 PROSE award (Language and Linguistics category) from the Association of American Publishers.

Sydney Corpus Lab

The Sydney Corpus Lab (headed by Monika Bednarek) was pleased to co-host in-person talks by Dr Gavin Brookes and Dr Luke Collins from the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). Event details are available here. We will soon (17 March) be co-hosting an in-person talk by Prof Maite Taboada (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) on ‘Online news comments through multiple lenses’. For all future events, you can subscribe to the lab’s mailing list here.

Recent blog posts on the lab's site can be found here and include posts about topic modelling in spontaneous speech data; triangulating computational and corpus linguistic methods to investigate climate discourse on Twitter; Australian media reporting on First Nations people/issues; and interviews with leading corpus linguists (more to come!).

The Sydney Corpus Lab, together with the Sydney Informatics Hub and Paradisec, is continuing its collaboration on two funded ARDC projects led by the University of Queensland: the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) and the Language Data Commons of Australia. Further information about these projects is available at the websites: https://www.atap.edu.au and https://www.ldaca.edu.au/. An upcoming ATAP event of interest to linguists: 22 March 2023, 15:00 – 16:30 “A hands-on guide to Semantic Tagger for your text data analysis” (online workshop). Event details and registration via this link.

Publications

Bednarek, M. (2022/2021) Australian Aboriginal English in Indigenous-authored television series: A corpus linguistic study of lexis in Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road. The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia 12 (1-2). Special issue on Australia as a Risk Society: Hopes and Fears of the Past, the Present and the Future.

Djenar, Dwi Noverini and Sidnell, Jack (Eds.) 2023. Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities. Singapore: NUS Press.

Enfield, N. J. 2023. Linguistic concepts are self-generating choice architectures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378: http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0352

Enfield, N. J. 2022. Enchrony. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews – Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1597

Enfield, N. J. 2023. Asymmetries in the system of person reference in Kri, a language of upland Laos. In Djenar, Dwi Noverini and Sidnell, Jack (Eds.). Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities. Singapore: NUS Press.

Hyslop, Gwendolyn 2023. Miratives and magic: on ‘newness’ as iconic grammar in Kurtöp. In Alexandra Aikhenvald, Rob Bradshaw, Luca Cucci and Pema Wangdi (eds.), Celebrating Indigenous voice: legends and narratives in languages of the tropics, 219-235. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789836-009.

Hyslop, Gwendolyn 2023. Toward a typology of tonogenesis: Revising the model, Australian Journal of Linguistics, DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2022.2157675

Post, Mark. W. 2023. ‘Classifiers in a language with articles: Recent evolution of a typologically unusual classifier system in the Tani languages of northeast India.’ Asian Languages and Linguistics 3(2): 241-270. https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.22012.pos

Nick Enfield

News from UNE

Congratulations to the following students for successful examination of their Masters theses:

Clare Galvin

Title: ‘What is they: Exploring the acceptability of singular, non-binary they’
Supervisor: Dr Sally Dixon

Bruce Taylor Coombe

Title: ‘Aspects of Gela Grammar’
Supervisor: Dr Cindy Schneider

Cindy Schneider

News from Western Sydney University

Hannah Sarvasy ran a week-long workshop on Nungon grammar for Nungon-speaking elementary schoolteachers in Lae, Papua New Guinea (December, 2022). Her article for the general public on respectful engagement with local languages in PNG ran in the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter in February, 2023: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/keeping-languages-alive-family

Caroline Jones

News from Griffith University

Publications

Bromhead, Helen and Carsten Levisen. 2022. Environmental semantics. Scandinavian Studies in Language 13(1): 78-87. [open access]

Bromhead, Helen. 2022. Tensions in talking about disasters: Habitual versus climate-informed–The case of bushfire vocabulary in Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 1-19. [open access]

Diget, Ida Stevia and Goddard, Cliff. 2022. Conceptual semantics and public messaging: “Risk-benefit” discourse around COVID-19 vaccination. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1): 303–331. [Open access]

Sadow, Lauren, 2022. NSM-based cultural dictionaries: For language learners and beyond. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1): 274–302. [Open access]

Tsai, P. S., Qi, G. Y., Eisenchlas, S.A., & Schalley, A.C. (2022) 旅澳具臺灣背景家庭之語言維護與身分認同 [Language Maintenance and Identity of Families with Taiwanese Background in Australia],International Journal of Chinese Language Education (12):31-56. [Open access]

Grant news

Helen Bromhead, Cliff Goddard, and Danielle Heinrichs are CI’s on a new National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) ‘Ideas’ grant. The project is titled: “Community driven communication and engagement during health crisis periods: co-designing enhanced and transferable strategies”.

The project (funded $589,000 over 3 years) is being led by A/Prof Holly Seale at University of New South Wales. The CI team is interdisciplinary and includes eight researchers in all, from UNSW, Griffith and UTS, and a similar number of Associate Investigators. It is largely focussed on culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

Conference and Seminars

Goddard, Cliff. 2023. ‘Hard’ and ‘sharp’ in human material culture. Feature presentation at “Deep explorations in NSM Semantics" workshop (February 2, 2023). Australian National University.

Jorgensen, Eleanor, Lisa Petersen and Samantha Rarrick. 2022. Future-proofing corpora: What eyeblinks in Hawai'i Sign Language Show. ALS Annual Conference. (November 30, 2023).

Arab, Reza & Samantha Rarrick. 2023. Tok Pilai (‘playful language’): An Indigenous oral tradition. 29th Annual Conference of the Australasian Humour Studies Network (February 10, 2023)

Rarrick, Samantha & Reza Arab. 2023. Contextual clips as neglected (meta)data: Insights on corpora from a humorous collaboration. 8th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation. (March 9, 2023)

Outreach and engagement

Shoecroft, Kelly. 2023. Effective implementation of translanguaging pedagogy in TESOL classrooms’. VicTESOL webinar. (9th March, 2023). For EAL/D and TESOL teachers in primary, high school, public/private schools, as well as adult education centres.

Shoecroft, Kelly. 2022. Translanguaging pedagogy in action: The concept, the benefits and the implementation. Keynote presentation in NSW TAFE professional development day (9 December, 2022).

HDR Student Updates

Cliff Goddard, Lauren Sadow (both Griffith) and Zhengdao Ye (ANU) co-organised an HDR-centred, in-person Workshop at ANU (February 2-3, 2023). It was titled “Deep Explorations into Natural Semantic Metalanguage”. HDRs from Griffith and ANU participated (Ida Diget, Stephanie Mašková, Alena Kazmaly, Emma Rao, Wendi Xue), along with staff from both universities and from University of Canberra.

Stephanie Mašková Pedersen gave her Early Candidature Milestone presentation “Landscape and climate-related semantics in Greenland-Danish" (3 March 2023).

Visitors

Yuanmeng Liu (a PhD scholar from Beihang University, Beijing) arrived in February as a Visiting Scholar. She will be looking into the cognitive, lexical and grammatical semantics of posture verbs in Chinese, combining perspectives from NSM and Event Grammar.

Other

Lauren Sadow has re-located to Aarhus University (Denmark) as a Research Fellow on a newly-funded project titled: “Danish in the making: Intercultural Pragmatics in the teaching of Danish as a second language”. The project is being led by Susanna Fernández and Carsten Levisen.

Cliff Goddard

News from the University of New South Wales

Publications

Chan WS; Kruger JL; Doherty S. (2022). 'An investigation of subtitles as learning support in university education', Journal of Specialised Translation, 155-179.

Doherty S; Martschuk N; Goodman-Delahunty J; Hale S. (2022). An eye-movement analysis of overt visual attention during consecutive and simultaneous interpreting modes in a remotely interpreted investigative interview. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.764460.

Hatoss, A. (2023). Everyday multilingualism: Linguistic landscapes as practice and pedagogy. London/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003293781

Hatoss, A. (2022). That word “abuse” is a big problem for us: South Sudanese parents’ positioning and agency vis-à-vis parenting conflicts in Australia. Linguistics and Education, 67, 101002.

Hill, C. (2023). Multiparty storytelling in Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u. Australian Journal of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2022.2153580

Poulton T & Hill C. (2023). Linguistic Descriptions and Cultural Models of Olfaction in Umpila and English, Language Sciences, 96, 101533. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2022.101533

Radnan MJ; Li W; Stevens CJ; Hill C; Jones C. (2022). Measuring engagement among older adults using a multidimensional approach to communication. Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.981008

Events

The School of Humanities and Languages hosted The 10th Asian-Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural Studies, 5-7 Feb. 2023. The theme of the forum The forum’s theme was Intercultural Communication through Specialised Translation and Interpreting in the New Era. This event gathered scholars, educators and practitioners in the fields of translation, interpreting and intercultural studies together to exchange perspectives on new trends across disciplines.

Students

Congratulations to Dimitrije Karadarević on their first-class honours thesis titled Words at the Border: Clitic and Phrase-level Syntax of Dharawal. This honours project was undertaken with support and direction from the Dharawal Language Program, Gujaga Foundation. Supervised by Clair Hill and Mengistu Amberber.

Community engagement

In Term 1(2023) four linguistics students (1 UG and 3 MA level) are undertaking a term based research placements (Term 1 2023) on Dharawal in partnership with Dharawal Language Program at the Gujaga Foundation. Each student is working on a project formulated in partnership with Dharawal Language program and supports current community goals in this local language reclamation work.

Clair Hill

News from the University of Wollongong

Grants

Alfredo Herrero de Haro has been awarded a four-year research fellowship in Spain through the Emergia Research Fellowship Grant (217,000EUR) to develop an interactive linguistic atlas of the accents of Andalusia (southern Spain). He will be based at the Universidad de Granada (Spain) while working on this project. (Project title: Interactive Linguistic Atlas Andalusian Accents)

Publications

Herrero de Haro, Alfredo (2023). Descripción acústica del andaluz oriental: Estado de la cuestión. In Á. Arias (ed.) Sistematicidad y variación en la fonología del español. A Coruña: Axac. 213 – 250.

Herrero de Haro, Alfredo and Delicado Cantero, Manuel (2022). Longitudinal study of Spanish vowel acquisition by Australian students. Language Teaching Research (Sage).

Alfredo Herrero de Haro

News from the University of Newcastle

New staff

In December, Newcastle welcomed Dr Jayden Macklin-Cordes to a new, ongoing position as Lecturer in Linguistics. Jayden completed his PhD at the University of Queensland in 2021 and brings experience as a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS Dynamics of Language Lab (DDL) in Lyon, France. Jayden specialises in comparative linguistics and linguistic phylogenetics. At Newcastle, Jayden joins the OzSpace program (lead CI: A/Prof Bill Palmer) investigating spatial reference systems in Australian languages, while continuing research projects on the evolution of nominal classifier and gender systems with colleagues in Europe and Taiwan.

Research grants

In November 2022, a team of researchers led by Newcastle’s Prof Hugh Craig were awarded an ARC LIEF grant (LE230100079), with Newcastle as the host institution. Newcastle CIs include Craig, Lyndall Ryan, Bill Palmer, and Catharine Colborne, along with CIs from Edith Cowan, Flinders, UniSA, ANU, Melbourne, and New England. Titled Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia: Advanced techniques and big data, the aim of the project is to understand Australian history and culture better through the perspective afforded by large data sets with spatial and temporal coordinates. To this end the project aims to build open-access infrastructure to create and analyse large spatio-temporal data sets, and to provide new map layers to serve as context for multiple research projects. Users would be able to deal with spatio-temporal data sets as dynamic systems and create multi-layered maps with them. The benefits would be a marked increase in the ease of humanities research using digital mapping and clear pathways to big data, high-end projects combining structured space and time data with traditional humanities insights and approaches. The team was awarded $472,543 to implement this project. Integrating the map to the PARADISEC archive is a component of a separate previously announced LIEF grant led by Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne. Work on integrating the TLCMap and PARADISEC is scheduled to be carried out this year.

Newcastle was also awarded smaller grants under the 2022 ALS Research Grant Scheme, to Jaime Hunt and Sacha Davis for the project German as a heritage language and culture in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley Australia Phase 2, and to Bill Palmer and Kiwako Ito for the project To the side of, or just nearby? An eye-tracking study of an undifferentiated egocentric transverse axis in Australian English. Jaime and Sacha’s project forms part of a multigenerational study investigating socio-historical factors shaping the maintenance, evolution and/or loss of cultural and linguistic practices of German-speaking migrants and their descendants living in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, NSW. One output of the project is an exhibition at the Newcastle Museum, opening August 2023, and interview audio data will be made publicly available via Living Histories (https://livinghistories.newcastle.edu.au), the digital home of the University of Newcastle's Special Collections.

Newcastle’s A/Prof Kiwako Ito and Dr Pauline Welby of the CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langue, France, have been awarded a French-Australian Government Mobility Grant of 8,000€ to investigate phonetically variable input in L2 French processing in different French-speaking regions of the world.

Conferences and talks

Newcastle was represented at the 14th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology at the University of Texas Austin by Jayden Macklin-Cordes (The evolutionary dynamics of grammatical gender in Torricelli languages) with Jose Antonio Jódar-Sánchez & Marc Allassonnière-Tang, and the poster Correlated evolution of numeral base and classifier word orders in Tibeto-Burman languages with One-Soon Her & Marc Allassonnière-Tang; by Bill Palmer (Directional terms in Australian languages: A survey with Dorothea Hoffmann & Alice Gaby); and by Laurits Stapput Knudsen & Bill Palmer (The structural status of spatial expressions of spatial frames of reference). While in the US, Bill Palmer also presented a colloquium at the Center for Cognitive Science at University at Buffalo (Sociotopography: language, culture, environment and the representation of space), and a talk at the Endangered Language Alliance (New York) (Talking about directions in Indigenous Australian languages). PhD student Amy Dewar presented a talk at the 12th Conference on Oceanic Languages at the University of French Polynesia (Loss of distinctive front-back parameter in Fakamae (Vanuatu): a phonetic study with Bill Palmer).

Newcastle was well represented at the 2022 ALS conference at the University of Melbourne, with papers by Jayden Macklin-Cordes (A statistical analysis of word-initial apical neutralisation in Warlmanpa with Mitchell Browne), Bill Palmer (Spatial language in Meryam Mir (Oriomo, eastern Torres Strait) and its neighbours), and adjunct Mark Harvey (The Wagiman landscape: mental maps and prototypes), as well as PhD students Page Maitland (An investigation of language change and contact effects on aspect and mood in languages of New Guinea), Laurits Stapput Knudsen (Paraphrasis, grammar, and lexicon: a usage-based approach to determine the structural status of spatial expressions with Bill Palmer, and The Rotating Scene Machine – a topographical testbench for semantic typology with Joe Blythe, Eleanor Yacopetti & Tom Ennever), and Alex Smith (Gamifying the acquisition of novel spatial terms: A pilot eye-tracking study with Bill Palmer & Kiwako Ito), and by recent PhD graduate Daniel Krauße (Non-contiguous coverb constructions in Wagiman).

Alan Libert represented Newcastle at the Sydney Language Festival on 11 February, presenting a talk titled Buryat, Oirat, Dagur, Santa (Mongolic Languages).

HDR updates

Condra Antoni passed his confirmation in November with the project “Discourse Strategies in English Medium Instruction (EMI) Lectures at Indonesian Polytechnics: How Teaching Content-Subjects in English Supports Students’ Learning and Language Related Employability Skills”.

Melgis Dilkawaty Pratama passed her confirmation in October. The title of her project is “Exploring EFL Student Plagiarism: Insights of Islamic Higher Education in Indonesia”.

Amy Dewar was awarded a PhD in August for her thesis “A grammar of Fakamae, a Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu with a study of Fakamae multilingualism”.

Daniel Krauße graduated in December with a PhD for his thesis “Towards a theory of complex predicates in Australian and Oceanic languages. An analysis of Coverb Constructions in Wagiman and Serial Verb Constructions in Vurës.”OzSpace

In December, Jayden Macklin-Cordes and OzSpace PhD Candidate Laurits Stapput Knudsen participated in a workshop for the OzSpace team in Warburton, Victoria. During this workshop, Jayden, Laurits and the other attending OzSpace team members developed analysis schemes for the comparative aspects of the project, as well as writing abstracts for upcoming conferences in 2023.

Laurits also commenced his fieldwork with two preliminary visits to Aurukun (Far North Queensland), where he will be working with Wik-Mungkan speakers on spatial reference. For his PhD project, he will be looking at how people in the community talk about spatial relations, motion, and the surrounding environment.

Publications

Carignan, C. & Chen, J. & Harvey, M. & Stockigt, C. & Simpson, J. & Strangways, S. 2023. An investigation of the dynamics of vowel nasalization in Arabana using machine learning of acoustic features. Laboratory Phonology 14(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.9152

Harvey, Mark. 2022. The Wagiman Landscape: Mental Maps and Prototypes. Oceania 92(3). 287–309. https://doi.org/10.1002/ocea.5350.

Hunt, Jaime W. 2022. Snakes, sharks, and the Great Barrier Reef: Selected use of Anglicisms to represent Australia in the Australian-German language newspaper, Die Woche. Frontiers in Communication, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.818837

Hunt, J. W. 2022. Hey, it’s what all the cool kids are talking about, okay? Exploring collocations of Anglicisms in spoken German. In R. Martí Solano, & P. Ruano San Segundo (Eds.), Anglicisms and Corpus Linguistics: Corpus-Aided Research into the Influence of English on European Languages, 119-136. Peter Lang.

Hunt, Jaime W., & Sacha E. Davis. 2022. ‘So, mein Deutsch ist schlecht … ’: echoes of societal attitudes and education language policies within the family language policies of second- and third-generation German speakers in Newcastle, Australia. International Journal of Multilingualism, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2022.2037609

Taw, Ly Wen, Alan R. Libert & Shamala Paramasivam. 2022. Building virtual rapport with emotion expressions: Hotel responses to positive online reviews. LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network 15(2).

Taw, Ly Wen, Paramasivam, Shamala, Libert, Alan R., Moskovsky, Christo, Jalaluddin, Ilyana & Darmi, Ramiza. 2022. Managing virtual rapport on TripAdvisor: Discourse in hotel responses to negative online reviews. 3L: Language, Linguistics and Literature: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 28(3).

Conference proceedings

Harvey, Mark, Juqiang Chen, Michael Carne, Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen, Clara Stockigt, Jane Simpson & Sydney Strangways. 2022. Apical stops in Arabana: lenition and undershoot. In Rosey Billington (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 151–155. Canberra: ASSTA.

Libert, Alan Reed 2022. "On religious terms in the artificial language Babm" in M. Y. Dortbudar and M. Erdogan (eds.) Proceedings of the International Göbeklitepe Scientific Research Congress, Sanliurfa, Turkey. Iksad Publications, Ankara.

Libert, Alan Reed (2022). "On the category “consumable goods of industries and others” in the artificial language Babm" in A. F. Ozel, G. Turun, and A. M. Sensik (eds.) Proceedings of the International Istanbul Congress of Multidisciplinary Scientific Research. Iksad Publications, Ankara.

Panther, Forrest & Mark Harvey (2022). Markedness in Kaytetye reduplication: an information-theoretic analysis. In Rosey Billington (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 141–145. Canberra: ASSTA.

Jayden Macklin-Cordes

News from the ANU

Welcome

Welcome to Evan Kidd who has taken up a new Professorial position in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics from November, 2022.

New staff on the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA)

Two new staff have been hired to work with Catherine Travis as part of the ANU LDaCA team: Li Nguyen, post-doctoral fellow (PhD Cambridge 2021), will be working in particular on collections from migrant communities in Australia (in community languages and in English)

Wolfgang Barth, data scientist (former CoEDL corpus manager), will support LDaCA and ATAP in the development and training for some of the technology for the project.

HDR News

ANU Linguistics welcomes 12 new PhD students across CASS and CAP: Aditi Dubey (supervisor: Jennifer Hendriks), Alphaeus Zobule (supervisor: Nick Evans), Angela Windsor (supervisor: Susy Macqueen), Anneke Meyers (supervisor: Jane Simpson), Laura Chien (Supervisor: Mary Dahm), Caroline Hendy (Supervisor: Danielle Barth), Kira Davey (supervisor: Danielle Barth), Saurabh Kumar Nath (supervisor: Danielle Barth), Yustinus Ghanggo Ate (supervisor: Wayan Arkan), Thomas Powell-Davies (supervisor: Rosey Billington), Shubo Li (supervisor: Rosey Billington) and Yujiao Zhu (supervisor: Manuel Delicado Cantero).

Congratulations to Kristina Gallego, who obtained her PhD for her thesis on "Language contact and change in Babuyan Claro, Philippines” (supervised by Beth Evans), to Manuel Gonzalez Perez for his thesis 'Grammar, dimension, and deixis in Phola' (supervised by Nick Evans), and to Charlotte van Tongeren, who has obtained her PhD for her grammar of Suki.

Congratulations to Elena Sheard (PhD student, Sydney Speaks), who has been offered a post-doctoral position at the NZ Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury, working with Jen Hay on the project “Do patterns of covariation in speech carry social meaning”. She will be taking up the position this month. We wish her the best of luck!

Congratulations to Maho Fukuno, who has taken up a continuing lecturer position in Japanese Studies in RMIT’s School of Global, Urban and Social Sciences. We wish her all the best for her future academic endeavours!

Awards/fellowships

Congratulations to ANU ICH Director Diana Slade who is one of 56 newly elected Fellows of the British Academy of Social Sciences. This prestigious fellowship is awarded to Diana in recognition of her outstanding contribution to linguistics, healthcare communication and translational research. Her dedication to these fields has significantly advanced understanding of theoretical linguistic frameworks for describing and conceptualising language in social interaction and more recently, the relationship between communication and patient safety in healthcare contexts. Diana is 1 of 2 Australians elected in this round and only the second Fellow from ANU.

I Wayan Arka was elected Fellow to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for his significant achievements and outstanding contribution to linguistics and language literacy education, maintenance and documentation of minority languages in Indonesia.

Rachel Nordlinger, Gaby Garrido and Evan Kidd were awarded the best paper in Language for 2022. Info here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards#best-language

Denise Angelo has been declared winner of the Penny McKay award for the most outstanding thesis submitted at an Australian university in the preceding academic year on aspects of school-based second/additional language education in Australia (title: Countering misrecognition of Indigenous contact languages and their ecologies in Australia). The Award is jointly offered by the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) and the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ).

Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan won the 2022 National Folk Fellowship and was also a recipient of an ABC Top 5 Media Residency for the Arts in 2022.

Grants

‘Voices of Regional Australia: The linguistic patterning of local attachment’ – new ARC DP awarded to Catherine Travis, Ksenia Gnevsheva and Gerry Docherty (2023-2026). This project aims to investigate language and social dynamics among regional Australians, who, despite representing one third of the population, have been often neglected in the research to date. The project expects to generate new knowledge around regional attachment and the impact that has on speech patterns, adapting for the first time recently developed international metrics to the Australian context. Expected outcomes include a better understanding of models of language change across urban and rural areas, and a novel dataset recording the stories of regional Australians, and in particular, their experiences facing bushfire. This should provide significant benefits as a record of life, language and community in regional Australia.

Other Australian researchers involved: Felicity Cox (Reference Group member), Jean Mulder (Community Consultant)

New ARC DP grant for “Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology” 2023-2027---awarded to I Wayan Arka, Bernd Nothofer and Simon Greenhill. This project aims to investigate endangered languages of the Asia-Pacific via four undocumented languages in the Barrier Islands, Indonesia. New knowledge will be generated into the languages, cultures and societies of the region on an unprecedented scale, and new data will uncover past migration patterns in Southeast Asia, advance language theory (such as linguistic typology and language change), and support the computational modelling of Austronesian for future language technologies. Connections with Indonesian institutions will strengthen Australia’s regional engagement, and support language revitalisation and maintenance among minority communities for the preservation of their culture and history.

Darja Hoenigman commenced her 3-year ELDP Major Documentation Project Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Awiakay and Meakambut, Papua New Guinea. In this project, Darja will collaborate with botanist Dr. Janet Gagul from the University of Papua New Guinea and with members of Awiakay and Meakambut communities from East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea to document Awiakay and Meakambut traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and language use related to TEK. The two communities are caught up in a goldrush and the radical social changes it brings. This documentation will ensure that the detailed knowledge about plants and animals found in this ecological area and transmitted through the two languages, is not lost. The project builds on Darja's previous long-term ethnographic fieldwork, including the documentation of Awiakay and Meakambut ways of speaking. Landing pages in ELAR:

Awiakay TEK: https://www.elararchive.org/dk0695/

Meakambut TEK: https://www.elararchive.org/dk0705/

Social media and newsletter

Carmel O'Shannessy and Warlpiri woman, Zindzi, are interviewed about Light Warlpiri in a podcast, 'Radiolingo', by Crooked Media. You can listen to "Radiolingo" on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or any other app you listen to podcasts on). See the episode "Congrats! It's a language!" to hear about Light Warlpiri, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and conlangs (constructed languages). Go to 15:58 mins to hear the section about Light Warlpiri.

Gamilaraay at ANU

Gamilaraay is a language from northern central NSW and adjacent Queensland. The enrolments in ’Speaking Gamilaraay’ at ANU have hit an all-time high, with 40 students taking the course (INDG2003). There is an increasing proportion of Gamilaraay and other Indigenous students taking the course, including Indigenous academics. Over half of the students are taking the course online, with around 10 enrolled via Open Universities Australia, many of them Indigenous. When there is sufficient demand ANU also runs a second Gamilaraay course as a winter intensive (INDG2004). That course has a much higher proportion of Indigenous students, generally enrolling via OUA. ANU College of Continuing Education also has a non-accredited, 8-week Gamilaraay course, run each school term when there is sufficient demand. The CCE course has a very high proportion of Indigenous students. The accredited course has been taught at the University of Sydney since 2006 and at ANU since 2011. The CCE course was first delivered in 2021.

Events: Summer School, Seminars, workshops and conferences

Summer scholars

Sixteen summer scholars were hosted by the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (SLLL), the School of Culture, History and Language (CHL) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) between November 21 2022 and January 20 2023, as part of ANU’s Summer Scholar program, supported by the College of Sciences (CoS) and the Australian Signals Directorate.

Supervisors include: Shunichi Ishihara (CHL), Yuko Kinoshita (CHL), Frantz Clermont (CHL), Roy Barker (SLLL), Alison Mount (SLLL), Carmel O’Shannessy (SLLL), Jane Simpson (SLLL & CoEDL), and Myfany Turpin (University of Sydney).

Program: Scholars were assigned to one of five research projects: i) Forensic voice comparison; ii); Forensic text comparison; iii) Muruwari language transcription and cultural portal; iv) Kaytetye dictionary project; and v) Little Kids Learning Languages; the latter three focusing on Australian languages. Scholars and supervisors were both very satisfied with their research experiences.

International Symposium on Communication in Health Care a resounding success

The ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care is pleased to report the success of our two-day International Symposium on Communication in Health Care on 14-15 February 2023, co-hosted with QUT Health Research Network. With 130 attendees in person and online from 14 countries, it was truly an international group. The symposium reflected the breadth of research underway in healthcare communication with thought-provoking presentations and panels with speakers from the disciplines of linguistics, medicine, nursing and midwifery, epidemiology and public health, communication science and allied health. We also welcomed health consumer advocates, staff from public, private and Aboriginal-owner health services and medical insurers. The symposium provided an invaluable opportunity for connecting with colleagues from the International Consortium for Communication in Healthcare and forging new partnerships. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Music!Dance!Culture!

Music!Dance!Culture! is a podcast about music and dance across cultures produced by Georgia Curran and Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan and supported by Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Australian Anthropological Society. It brings knowledge and examples of particularly vulnerable forms of performance and the voices of their practitioners to a broad audience. Episodes so far have focussed on cultures and languages ranging from Kisedje (Brazil), Yolngu and Warlpiri (Australia) as well as Portuguese Burghers (Sri Lanka), with many more to come. Below are details of the latest episode.

Publications

Arka, I Wayan, and Mary Dalrymple. 2022. "Number in Marori." In Number in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook, edited by Paolo Acquaviva and Michael Daniel, 577-606. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Billington, Rosey (ed.) 2022. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Bromham, L. (2023). Language endangerment: Using analytical methods from conservation biology to illuminate loss of linguistic diversity. Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, 1, E3. doi:10.1017/ext.2022.3

Carignan, Christopher, Chen, Juqiang, Harvey, Mark, Stockigt, Clara, and Simpson, Jane. 2023. An investigation of the dynamics of vowel nasalization in Arabana using machine learning of acoustic features. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 14:1-31. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.9152

Curran, Georgia, Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan, Sudiipta Dowsett, Wanta Steven Jampijimpa Patrick; Jerry Jangala Patrick 2022 “On Milpirri and digging yams of knowledge”, Music!Dance!Culture!

Durie, Mark 2022. Semantic decomposition of four Quranic words. Russian Journal of Linguistics. 26(4):937-969.

Durie, Mark 2022. What has Mecca to do with Jerusalem? Sacred geography and the etymology of Al-Ṣafā and Al-Marwah, in Leonid Iomdin, Jasmina Milićević, and Alain Polguère eds. Lifetime Linguistic Inspirations: To Igor Mel’čuk from Colleagues and Friends for his 90^th Birthday. Berlin: Peter Lang, 167-173.

Elena Govor and Kevin Windle, ‘The Dreamer and the Destroyer: Two Unconventional Tolstoians and their Impact in Australia’, in Tolstoi: Art and Influence, Reid, Robert and Joe Andrew (eds), Brill, Leiden / Boston, 2023, 161-178.

Evans, Nicholas. 2022a. Words of Wonder: What Endangered languages Tell Us. Second Edition of Evans (2009). Maldon & Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Evans, Nicholas. 2022b. The eye of the dolphin: Sally Gabori and the Kaiadilt vision. In Sally Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Gabori. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. Pp. 13-32. [French translation: (insert details )]

Evans, Nicholas & Manuel Pamkal. 2022. How a man got off the grog: a Dalabon “Family Problems” story. Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 16 (2022), pp.165–186. https://www.doi.org/10.15026/117161.

González Pérez, Manuel David. (2023). Spheres of interest: Space and social cognition in Phola deixis. Open Linguistics 9: 20220215.

Guillaume, Antoine and Koch, Harold. Associated Motion, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099

Rumsey, Alan, Evans, Nicholas and Mansfield, John (2023). The sound of one quotation mark: Quoted speech in Indigenous Australian narrative. In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., Bradshaw, Robert L., Ciucci, Luca and Wangdi, Pema. Celebrating Indigenous Voice: Legends and Narratives in Languages of the Tropics and Beyond, pp. 33-72. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789836

Rumsey, Alan, Singer, Ruth and Tomlinson, Matt (2022). Recent research on language and culture in Australia and Oceania. In Völkel, Svenja and Nassenstein. Nico (Eds.) Approaches to Language and Culture, pp. 443-70. Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726626

O’Shannessy, Carmel & Denise Angelo. 2023. Insights from the perspective of language ecologies and new contact languages in Australia. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22081.osh

Qiao, Gan and Catherine E. Travis. 2022. Ethnicity and social class in pre-vocalic the in Australian English. In Rosey Billington (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 56-60): Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Sheard, Elena. 2022. Longevity of an ethnolectal marker in Australian English: Word-final (er) and the Greek-Australian community. In Rosey Billington (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 51-55): Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2022, “What Did Jesus Want to Say by Washing His Disciples Feet”? In: Monika Kopytowska, Artur Galkowski, Massimo Leone, eds. Thought – Sign –Symbol: Cross-Cultural Representations of Religion. Berlin: Peter Lang. 145-164

Windle, Kevin. "Ukraine under the Soviets. The Memoirs of Vasyl' Sokil: translated excerpts [from the Ukrainian] with an introduction”, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 36, 2022, 129-150.

Zhengdao Ye (ed) 2022. The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Presentations

Mae Carroll was in Europe as part of their Newton Alumni Grant from the British Academy where they were invited to give the talk: “Discriminative exponence: the theory and typology of exponence from the hearer's perspective” at the Surrey Linguistics Circle and the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle in February 2023.
Darja Hoenigman gave a talk (invited by ELDP Director Mandana Seyfedinnipur) about language documentation and ethnographic fieldwork in PNG at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy for Sciences and Humanities for visiting Masters students of Art who were preparing an art installation on Language.
Between 15-17 February Darja also participated in the workshop 'Current Trends in Papuan Linguistics II' in Paris, France, where she could see many of the familiar faces (please see the attached photos and choose one that you like) https://ctpl2023.sciencesconf.org/

Wayan Arka

News from the Language and Communication Research Hub Centre for Indigenous Health Equity Research Central Queensland University

Staff news

Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald’s major editorial project for 2023 involves preparing a paperback edition of the fundamental Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (hardback 2018, Oxford University Press). She is finalising her comprehensive monograph A guide to gender and classifiers (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), in addition to working on a comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea.

Thanks for the presence of the internet connection access to WhatsApp in Brazilian Amazonia, she continues her work with the extant speakers of the Wamiarikune dialect of Tariana in Iauaretê and São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas, Brazil). She is working closely together with the Tariana communities in providing materials for the Tariana school Enu Irine Idakini in Iauaretê, under the leadership of Isaias Lobo Brito and Osmar Brito.

She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea.

She has joined an Expert Committee for the World Atlas of Languages (WAL) at UNESCO.

Her planned presentations (via zoom) include:

‘Names and naming: what minority languages tell us’. A seminar at the University of Lund, 30 March 2023, zoom link https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/63263453894
‘Language loss and language gain across centuries: a view from Arawak languages’, 1er Encuentro Internacional de pueblos, Lenguas y culturas Arawak, Universidad de la Guajira Shikii Ekirajia Pülee Wajira, 1 May 2023.
‘The world through the prism of language: noun categorization devices and the ecology of language’. Sociedad Argentina de Estudios Lingüísticos, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, 3 May 2023.

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon continues his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendants of the Yidinji speakers. He is providing information and advice on introducing original Dyirbal language concepts and terminology within the framework of Indigenous Engagement and First Nations’ Research at CQUniversity, as a priority within the Jawun Research Centre. An unusual feature of the Dyirbal language situation was the use of Jalnguy, the special avoidance style (nicknamed ‘Mother-in-law language’). This has the same phonology and grammar as the everyday style of speech, but entirely different lexicon. Dixon has published some information about Jalnguy in a number of places over the years. He is now pulling everything together into a book-length comprehensive account.

Dr Brigitta Flick continues working at the Jawun Research Centre as a Publication Officer within the research projects of the Centre.

Christoph Holz, a PhD student at the Jawun Research Centre (CQU), has submitted his thesis “A comprehensive grammar of Tiang”. Tiang is an Oceanic language of New Ireland Province in Papua New Guinea. His supervisory committee are: Alexandra Aikhenvald, Bob Dixon, Miriam Ham, Janya McCalman, and Michael Wood. He will be participating in the launch of a Taanuaa: Tiang Picture Book and Pini: Tiang Story Book in mid-March 2023 in New Ireland (Djaul).

Yann LeMoullec, a PhD student at LACITO (Paris), with Professor Dr Isabelle Bril and Alexandra Aikhenvald as his supervisors, is currently working on a comprehensive study of gender and other grammatical topics in Angaataha, an Angan language.

Dr Michael Wood, an expert in anthropological study in the New Guinea area (with a focus on the Kamula of Western Province and on New Britain), has been awarded an Adjunct appointment at the Jawun Research Centre.

Dr Pema Wangdi, an expert in Brokpa and other Bhutanese languages, will shortly be receiving an Adjunct appointment with the Centre.

Visiting scholar in 2023

Professor Chia-jung Pan (PhD James Cook University, 2012) is Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Linguistic Sciences of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, China. His research interests include linguistic anthropology, linguistic typology, morphosyntax and pragmatics. He has conducted immersion fieldwork on some Austronesian languages of Taiwan, with special focus on Tsou and Saaroa. During his stay at the Jawun Research Centre in April-July 2023, he will be working on a cross-culturally and cross-linguistically informed project ‘The grammar of naming systems and names’, with a special focus on the names and naming principles among the First Nations peoples of PR China, Australia and his native Taiwan., and on comprehensive documentation of crucially endangered First Nations languages of Taiwan, in particular, Saaroa, preparing, for publication, a reference grammar with texts and a dictionary, in addition to a special presentation dealing with the importance of language and of naming systems for social and emotional well-being, thus contributing to the intellectual ambiance of the Centre and CQU.

Seminar Series (Communication, Health, and Social and Cultural Well-being)

When: Wednesdays, 3pm – 5 pm Qld time

Where: Rm 3.06, CQUniversity, CBD Cairns, Corner Abbott Street and Shield St. https://cqu.zoom.us/j/86814594424?pwd=VlJPbTl0cXd3YTZ1c2k3UzIwUU80UT09; Password: 802258

Information on the seminar series: https://www.cqu.edu.au/research/organisations/jawun-research-centre/about-us and https://www.facebook.com/groups/cquniyarning/

Wednesday 22 March 2-4 pm approx. Special event

Launch of Professor R. M.W. Dixon’s A New Grammar of Dyirbal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, by Professor Adrian Miller, Deputy Vice-President Indigenous Engagement, BHP Chair in Indigenous Engagement, Director of the Jawun Research Centre (RSVP: To the Office by 15 March 2023 via email research-cira@cqu.edu.au or by calling (07) 4923 2672

Wednesday 5 April 3 pm - 5 pm

The state of sleep health and its implications for First Nations Australians. Presenter: Professor Sarah Blunden (U Adelaide/CQU)

Wednesday 19 April 3 pm - 5 pm: Special event

Linguistic divergence and form vs order. Presenter: Dr John Mansfield (U Melbourne)

Wednesday 3 May 4 pm - 5 pm – Inaugural Lecture in new series – The Babalmari Lectures

Professor Adrian Miller, Deputy Vice-President Indigenous Engagement, /BHP Chair in Indigenous Engagement, Director of the Jawun Research Centre

Wednesday 7 June 3 pm - 5 pm

French in the Pacific (TBC). Presenter: Dr Florence Boulard (JCU)

Wednesday 5 July 3 pm - 5 pm

Origins and diversity of the French language and its dialects. Presenter: Dr Françoise Daquin

For further information contact Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald (Sasha) at a.aikhenvald@cqu.edu.au phone: 0400 305 315

New books

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, ed. (2022). Classifiers. Special issue of Asian Languages and Linguistics 3:2.

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert L. Bradshaw, Luca Ciucci and Pema Wangdi (eds). 2023. Celebrating Indigenous Voice: legends and narratives in languages of the Tropics. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Alexander Andrason and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, eds. 2022. The rise and fall of serial verbs. A special issue of Stellenbosch Working Papers in Linguistics.

Dixon, R. M. W. 2022. A new grammar of Dyirbal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Materials available online

The materials from our Multidisciplinary Panel “Well-being, communication, and language: the First Nations' perspective” held on 14 September 2022, Jawun Research Centre and Chaired and coordinated by Professor Adrian Miller is now available (with some inevitable technical glitches) at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIBvdX1_bIM

They include presentations by Sue McGinty, Yvonne Cadet-James, Michael Walsh, Rob Amery, R. M. W. Dixon, Heronides Moura, Rosita Henry, and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald.

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

News from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE)

VET Language Courses

Batchelor Institute and Tauondi Aboriginal College have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deliver the following Language certificates:

Certificate II in Learning an Australian First Nation's Language

Certificate III in Learning an Australian First Nation's Language

Certificate IV in Teaching an Australian First Nation's Language

Batchelor Institute is currently preparing for the delivery to commence with identified groups in 2023.

Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics (CALL)

For information about CALL’s current and past project, visit our webpage: https://call.batchelor.edu.au/

Publications

Bednall, James 2023. ‘Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about time in Anindilyakwa’ in A. McGrath, J. Troy & L. Rademaker (eds.) Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History (pp. 127-149). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Batchelor Press Language Projects

Mangarrayi seasonal calendar

Production of the Mangarrayi Seasonal Calendar was completed towards the end of 2022 in a partnership involving members of Jilkminggan community (140 kilometres southeast of Katherine), Batchelor Press, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Western Sydney University) and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Work on the calendar was carried out as part of a language revitalisation project and drew on the extensive research for the 2011 Northern Territory Botanical Bulletin publication Mangarrayi and Yangman plants and animals. More recent variations, however, were noted for the changes previously marking the four Mangarrayi seasons: Milgmilg (dry), Ganywarr (build-up), Garnan (wet) and Walywarru (knock ‘em downs), which were attributed to climate change. Key individuals for the project were Josephine Lardy, Anna Godden, Wanirr Godden, Phyllis Conway, Timmy Baker, Kerry Roberts, Trudy Farrar, Virginia Farrar, Anne-Marie Woods and Patrina Baker, and Mark Richards & Keely Honner (Western Sydney University). For copies and related enquiries, contact: josie@ilf.org.au

New children’s books

Wardaman and Anindilyakwa are the languages in focus for two new children’s books published by Batchelor Press.

Bornorron Warrag

Bornorron Warrag (Brolga and Catfish) is a Wardaman story about how the catfish got the marking on its head through an encounter with the brolga. The story relates to an area of the emerald-green Flora River in Wardaman Country which lies southwest of Katherine in the Victoria River District. The story is told by Wardaman speaker Sally Wiynmarr and illustrated by her nephew Bill Harney Junior, working with linguist Francesca Merlan. It is hoped that this is the first of several such stories to be published in an effort to preserve and revitalise Wardman language for future generations. The book includes translations and glossaries in English and Kriol (courtesy Greg Dickson, Yugul Mangi), and was assisted by funding from First Languages Australia and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, Berlin.

Nilaburnda Nabungkawa

Anindilyakwa speaker and interpreter Sylvia Tkac has a passion for passing on her mother tongue which currently has around 1,500 speakers mostly based on Groote Eylandt. In an effort to overcome the relative lack of school-based teaching resources, she has teamed up with Binh Phan on an Anindilyakwa version of the well-known German fairytale The Frog Prince, first published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. The Anindilyakwa title, Nilaburnda Nabungkawa, translates as, ”I didn’t know you were the Frog.” The book is currently in production with support from linguist James Bednall, Groote Eylandt Language Centre and community representatives. The illustrations are by Polish artist Katarzyna Kolodyńska making this a richly multicultural project. Sylvia and Binh actively promote the learning of Anindilyakwa through their videos on social media and this, their debut book, is envisaged to be the first of many.

CALL Collection

The CALL Collection is at Batchelor Institute Library, Batchelor Campus. If you are interested to know which Australian First Nations language materials and resources are in the collection, see the website callcollection@batchelor.edu.au. All titles are listed; only items with consent are accessible online. Physical copies of items are available (by request) to view at the Library.

For queries, requests or offers of materials, contact the Special Collections Officer Karen Manton, Batchelor Institute Library (08) 8939 7103. The Collection welcomes connection with and queries/requests from language people, collections on Country, language centres and community language projects.

Paola Fisher

News from Macquarie University

HDR News

Congratulations to our recent PhD and MRes graduates:

Chen, Jie. 2022. Multimodal management of participation in everyday conversation: A conversation-analytic study. Macquarie University PhD dissertation, supervised by Scott Barnes and Joe Blythe.

Liao, Sixin (2022). The impact of visual and auditory information on subtitle processing: An eye-tracking study. Macquarie University PhD dissertation, supervised by Jan-Louis Kruger, Erik Reichle, and Lili Yu.

Dr Sixin Liao has been awarded the First Laureate CIUTI PhD prize for her thesis. CIUTI is a select international association of university programs that teach T&I.

Conor Clements, Linguistics 2022: Variation in the duration of /æ/ trap in Australian English Macquarie University MRes Thesis, supervised by Dr Anita Szakay, Dr Joshua Penney, Dr Andy Gibson.

Recent Publications

Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2174082

Coretta, S., Casillas, J. V., Roettger, T. B., ..., Proctor, M., et al. (2022). Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.

Cox, F., Penney, J. & Palethorpe, S. (2022) Fifty years of change to definite article allomorphy in Australian English, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, pp 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002510032200007X

Gibson, A., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2022) Rhoticity and hiatus breaking in Australian English: Associations with community diversity, Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, December 2022.

Liao, S. & Kruger, J.-L. (2023). Cognitive processing of subtitles: Charting the future by mapping the past. In A. Ferreira, A. & Schwieter, J.W. Eds. The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting, and Bilingualism. London: Routledge. Chapter 11. pp. 161-176. doi:10.4324/9781003109020

Penney, J., Davies, B. & Cox, F. (2022) Assessing the validity of remote recordings captured with a generic smartphone application designed for speech research. Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, December 2022.

Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000689

Ratko, L., Proctor M & Cox, F. (2022) Articulation of vowel length contrasts in Australian English, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, pp. 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100322000068

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F., & Proctor, M. (2022) Reconsidering Lateral Vocalisation: Evidence from perception and production of Australian English /l/, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152, 2106-2116. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0014249

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F., & Proctor, M. (2022) Vowel merger in Australian English lateral-final rimes: /æɔ-æ/. Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, December 2022.

Szalay, T., Shahin, M., Ratko, L., Tharmakulsingam, S., Cox, F., Ballard, K., Ahmed, B. (2022). A semi-automatic workflow for orthographic transcription of a novel speech corpus: A case study of AusKidTalk, Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, December 2022.

White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2022) Evaluating automatic creaky voice detection methods, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152, 1476-1486. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0013888

White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2022) The influence of pitch and speaker sex on the identification of creaky voice by female listeners, Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, December 2022.

Presentations:

Blythe, Joe, Eleanor Yacopetti, Thomas Ennever & Laurits Knudsen. 2022. The Rotating Scene Machine: A topographical testbench for semantic typology. Presented at ALS2022, University of Melbourne.
Clements, C., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A & Cox, F. (2022), Documenting durational complexity of the TRAP vowel in Mainstream Australian English,. Presented at Forum on Englishes in Australia, La Trobe University, October 2022.
Clements, C, Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A & Cox, F. (2022) Phonological and lexical conditioning of trap vowel length in communities of varying linguistic diversity. Presented at Australian Linguistic Society Conference, Melbourne, 30th Nov-2nd Dec 2022.
Cox, F., Palethorpe, S. & Penney, J. (2022) Modelling dynamic features of diphthongs across 50 years of change. Presented at SocioPhonAus2, Brisbane 11th-12th July 2022
Gibson, A., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2022) Acquisition of r-sandhi and [ɹ] by Australian children. Presented at SocioPhonAus2, Brisbane 11th-12th July 2022
Jacobi, J., Rebernik, T., Jonkers, R., Maassen, B., Proctor. M., Wieling, M. (2022). Spatial and temporal variability of speech gestures during fast syllable repetition in Parkinson’s Disease: an articulatory study. Presented at 8th Intl. Conf. on Speech Motor Control, 24-27 Aug 2022, Groningen
Ratko, L., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (2022) Articulatory-Acoustic Timing relationships in Australian English vowels. Presented at Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra December 2022

Staff News

New staff at the Phonetics lab

Dr Louise Ratko has joined the Phonetics lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow after previously completing her Master of Research and PhD at Macquarie University. Louise’s research position is part of the ARC-funded project “Multicultural Australian English: The new voice of Sydney’”. As part of this project Louise is investigating articulatory differences between multiple ethnocultural groups within Sydney.

Dr. Mitchell Browne commenced a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Macquarie in February 2023. Mitch will be working on the ARC-funded Discovery Project "The building blocks of language: Words in Central Australian languages", with Rob Mailhammer (WSU), Mike Proctor (MQ), Mark Harvey (UoN), and Jane Simpson (ANU), and speakers of Anmatyerr, Kaytetye, Warumungu, and Warlmanpa. Mitch's focus will be examining morphophonological and morphosyntactic structure in Ngumpin-Yapa and Arandic. He has just returned from a successful visit to Tennant Creek where he reconnected with members of the Warumungu and Warlmanpa communities.

Farewells

With sadness we have said goodbye to Dr Andy Gibson. Andy had been working at Macquarie University since 2019 on the ARC Discovery Project “Children's speech, community diversity, and the emergence of sound change.”. He has taken on a Postdoctoral position working for Professor Devyani Sharma at Queen Mary University of London.

Andy Gibson has been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Language Sciences at Macquarie University for the last three years, working alongside Felicity Cox on the ARC-funded project "Child Speech, Community Diversity, and the Onset of Sound Change". Andy's research borders sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on performed language, co-editing with Allan Bell a 2011 special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on this topic. Andy’s PhD from the University of Canterbury was entitled “Sociophonetics of Popular Music: Insights from Corpus Analysis and Speech Perception Experiments” and was supervised by Jennifer Hay, Lynn Clark and Catherine Theys. In 2023, Andy will take up a position at Queen Mary University of London, working with Devyani Sharma on the "Generations of London English" project.

Workshops and conferences:
International Symposium on Bilingualism

Early bird registration is currently open for the 14th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB14), June 26-30, Macquarie University. To register and for more information on the conference click here https://www.isb14.com/home.

Internal Grants awarded

2022 Macquarie University Research Acceleration Scheme $50,000: Visualising complex speech sounds: A study of rhotic consonants – evidence from ultrasound, Cox, Proctor, Harrison, Kim, Szakay, Penney

Other news

Researchers from Macquarie University (Nan Xu Rattanasone, Jae-Hyun Kim, Sue Ollerhead, Scott Barnes, & Shirley Wyver) have started their NSW Department of Education funded project to provide evidence for the language literacy outcomes of children from diverse language backgrounds participating in language-content integrated learning programs.

The Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023 is now out at https://www.languageonthemove.com/language-on-the-move-reading-challenge-2023/ and the Language on the Move 2022 Annual Report is at https://www.languageonthemove.com/language-on-the-move-2022/.

Joe Blythe

News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics

Recent publications

Fukuno, M. (2023). Translators’ ethics in community translation: A case study of English–Japanese translators in the Australian system. In E. Gonzalez, K. Stachowiak-Szymczak & D. Amanatidou (Eds.), Community translation: Research and practice (pp. 42–67). Routledge.

David, C., Vincent-Durroux, L., Mullan, K., Béal, C. & Poussard, C. (2023). Temporal reference in oral narratives produced by French learners of English as a second language: The case of AND. In Gardelle, L., Vinckel-Roisin, H. & Vincent-Durroux, L. (eds.). Reference: From Conventions to Pragmatics, pp 305-322. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Conference presentations

Kerry Mullan with Reza Arab (Griffith University), Ying Cao (Wuhan Polytechnic University), Jessica Milner Davis (University of Sydney), and Michael Meany (University of Newcastle). “Covid-related humour in Australasia 2020: Freedom, safety and survival during lockdown.” Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference, University of Sydney, February.

HDR completions

Sumayyah Alsulami (supervisors Kerry Mullan and Chantal Crozet). The role of Communicative Language Teaching Approach in Developing Teaching English in Saudi Arabia.

Kerry Mullan

News from the University of Technology Sydney

Achievements

Archie Thomas commenced a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Their project will explore “the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline in Australian schools, with a focus on understanding how systemic racism, discrimination and discipline practices are connected.”

Laura Smith-Khan travelled to Ballarat to participate in the 53rd Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and receive the Max Crawford Medal (attached is photo of Laura receiving the medal) (see news summary on Language on theMove https://www.languageonthemove.com/laura-smith-khan-wins-max-crawford-medal/ ).

She also received a UTS Learning and Teaching Citation (November 2022) and a Law Faculty Team Award for Excellence in Teaching and/or the Student Experience (September 2022) in recognition of her innovative collaboration with the teaching team in the Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice, as part of her Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship project on migration agents’ regulation, education and communication.

Media appearances and interviews

Laura Smith-Khan: i) “Meet Australia’s SHAPE EMCRs – Dr Laura Smith-Khan”, SHAPEFutures, November 2022; ii) “Language, law and asylum seekers”, Razor’s Edge, 2SERFM, 6 October 2022; iii) “Maclean academic claims prestigious humanities award, the 2022 Max Crawford Medal” ABC Radio North Coast, 7 September 2022; and iv) “Fighting for a ‘fair go’ for refugees” The Daily Examiner, 6 September 2022,

Presentations

Laura Smith-Khan:

Invited participant on the concluding plenary panel, “A new Australian civilizational compact”, at 53^rd Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ballarat, 17-18 November 2022
Invited plenary presentation, “Integrating sociolinguistic approaches and scholarship in legal research and teaching”, Indonesian Community for Forensic Linguistics, 3^rdAnnual Conference, 6 November 2022
Presented in plenary “Language and credibility in asylum procedures.” The Regional Conference of the Asia Pacific Chapter of the International Association of Refugee and Migration Judges, 25 November 2022, Newcastle, NSW
Co-convened a panel on Linguistic Discrimination and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights with Jacqueline Mowbray (Sydney University) and presented “Access to work and English language proficiency requirements for migration agent registration”, at the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Network Annual Conference, 11 November 2022, UTS, Sydney
Prepared and recorded “Five tips for effective communication with Indigenous clients”, video resource for Grad Dip of Migration Law and Practice, November 2022 (thanks to colleagues for providing feedback on drafts)
Participated in an invited Q&A session on legal communication with linguistic minority clients with staff from the National Justice Project (legal organization), 8 November, 2022
Invited guest speaker, Yamba View Club, 6 October 2022; “Incredible language and credibility assessments in Australian asylum procedures”, invited seminar for Language Talks, University of New England, 27 September 2022
“Linguistic diversity and credibility in asylum procedures”, guest lecture for UTS Refugee Law and Practice students, 2 September 2022.

Recent Publications

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’, in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. Open Access (via https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs ). https://doi.org/10.0000/9781800411562

Grey, A. and Severin, A. A. (2022). ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communications in languages other than English: a case study of New South Wales, Australia.’ Griffith Law Review. 31:1, 25-56 https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2022.2031526

Grey, A. and Severin, A. A. (2021) ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’, Griffith Law Review 30(1). 122-147. DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2021.1970873

Grey, A. and Strauss, A. (2022). ‘New Limits on the Right to Freedom of Expression from Hamzy v Commissioner of Corrective Services’. Alternative Law Journal 2022 47(1):60-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X211055234

Smith-Khan, L. (2022). Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities: Improving communication for deaf forced migrants, in Handbook of Disability: Critical Thought, Human Rights and Social Change in a Globalizing World (Springer). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_26-1

Smith-Khan, L. (2022). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: A critical examination of registration requirements for Australian Registered Migration Agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97-121,https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031.

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621, https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113 .

Thomas, A. (2022). ‘We wanted to be boss’: self-determination, Indigenous governance and the Yipirinya School. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 1-17 (online first). DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2022.2151578

Thomas, A. (2022). ‘The economic world of choice’: mainstreaming discourses and Indigenous bilingual education in Australia 1998–99. Critical Discourse Studies, 1-16 (online first). DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2022.2088583

Laura Smith-Khan & Alexandra Grey\

Forthcoming Events

Call for Submissions for ALW 2023

We invite submissions to present at the Australian Languages Workshop (ALW) 2023: Ngawiyala

The theme for ALW 2023 is Ngawiyala. In the Dharug language this means ‘I give, you give’ and speaks to the importance of knowledge and practice transference, relationship, and reciprocity. For example, Elders giving to young ones, and young ones passing it on.

The ALW workshop is an annual opportunity for language practitioners, linguists and others researching, revitalising and advocating for First Nations languages. We are inviting submissions for talks of 15-20 minutes (plus about 10 minutes for questions).

ALW 2023 is hosted by Djiyagan Dhanbaan in partnership with Western Sydney University. ALW 2023 will be held between 21st to the 23rd July at the YMCA Camp Yarramundi (316 Springwood Rd, Yarramundi), near Richmond in western Sydney. We anticipate that a number of travel subsidies will be available for Indigenous participants coming from outside Sydney. Further details will be provided when registration opens.

How to submit your abstract:

Please visit the conference webpage:

https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/events/2023_events/2023_australian_languages_workshop_alw/_nocache

Deadline for submissions is: Tuesday 11 April at 6pm (AEST)

Notification of acceptance is anticipated to be by Friday 21 April.
Online registration will open in mid April.

Looking forward to seeing you on Dharug Country.

Wakulda ‘In Unity’

Anjilkurri Rhonda Radley (Chair, ALW, 2023)

Australex 2023 Call for papers

WHEN: Wednesday 16 August to Friday 18 August 2023

WHERE: Alice Springs

Papers may address a wide range of areas associated with lexicography including law and policy; contact linguistics; culture, lore, language and identity; e-lexicography; endangered languages; learners’ dictionaries; lexicology; music and language; onomastics; oral traditions and language; phraseology; Revival Linguistics; social empowerment through language; specialist dictionaries; and terminology.

Please submit an abstract of 150-250 words to: moored03@bigpond.com

Abstract submission deadline: April 14, 2023

David Moore

INTERSPEECH 2026

We are excited to share the news with you that the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA) has won the bid to host INTERSPEECH in Sydney in 2026. This is incredibly exciting and a wonderful opportunity to bring this prestigious conference back to Australasia to showcase the ground-breaking research we are doing in our region.

An official announcement has been made by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the statement italicised below has been included in the March ISCApad newsletter.

The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association is honoured to have been selected to host INTERSPEECH 2026. Our theme of Diversity & Equity – Speaking Together strongly reflects Sydney and our broader region. Sydney is Oceania’s largest city and is also its most linguistically diverse: more than 300 different languages are spoken and 40% of Sydneysiders speak a language other than English at home. Consistent with the goals of ISCA “to promote, in an international world-wide context, activities and exchanges in all fields related to speech communication science and technology”, INTERSPEECH Sydney will highlight the diversity of research in our field with a firm focus on equity and inclusivity. Recognising the importance of multi-dimensional approaches to speech, INTERSPEECH 2026 will foster greater interdisciplinarity to better inform current and future work on speech science and technology. We look forward to welcoming all to Sydney!

https://www.isca-speech.org/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=27802&back=p,302

Felicity Cox

The Free Linguistics Conference

The Free Linguistics Conference is back and will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, Sep 29 - Oct 31. This year, in support of women's rights worldwide, the conference organisers have invited an all female plenary lineup. More on conference: http://www.flcgroup.net/2023-2/

Vale

Fr Hilaire Valiquette, OFM, died aged 84 on 2 February 2022, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hilaire's 1990 UNM PhD was 'A study for a lexicon of Laguna Keresan'; he had a long association with the people of the Pueblos. He was recruited to continue the work of Fr Peile (d.1989) at Balgo (northeast WA). He worked there for 21 months in the early 1990s and completed the Kukatja dictionary (published by Luurnpa Catholic School, 1993). He returned to New Mexico, and later taught courses in missiology at several seminaries including the Franciscan seminary in the Philippines from 2012 to 2018. It was in 2012 he last visited Australia. Those of us who met him were struck by his compassionate insight.

David Nash

About ALS

The Australian Linguistic Society is the national organization for linguists and linguistics in Australia. Its primary goal is to further interest in and support for linguistics research and teaching in Australia. Further information about the Society is available by clicking here.

The ALS Newsletter is issued three times per year, in March, July and October. Information for the Newsletter should be sent to the Editor, Joe Blythe (alsonline-at-als.asn.au) by the end of the first week of March, July or October. There is a list of people who are automatically advised that it is time to contribute material; if you wish to be added to that list, send Joe an email.

Membership of ALS includes free subscription to the Australian Journal of Linguistics, which publishes four issues per year. Members are entitled to present papers at the annual conference. ALS membership is handled through the ALS website https://als.asn.au/.

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