The recipients of the 2024 ALS Research Grants Schemes are: Andi Syurganda for ‘Fieldwork project in Indonesia); Eleanor Jorgensen for ‘The expression of time in signing varieties used in Hawai’i’; Saurabh Kumar Nath for ‘The DoCEA Project’; Stacey Sherwood & Dariush Izadi for ‘Attitudes and ethnolects: Unpacking the social fabric of multicultural Western Sydney’; and Rebecca Holt for ‘Who’s talking now? Talker discrimination and identification by children with hearing loss’. Here are their project descriptions:

	Andi Syurganda: My project delves into the implementation of the Indonesian government’s local language maintenance program, focusing on the Bugis language, which is declining in vitality. It seeks to understand how local language policies align with community attitudes and practices in Bugis-speaking districts of South Sulawesi. The study explores the tensions between the official language policy, community beliefs, and language practices that contribute to the shift from Bugis to more dominant languages like Bahasa Indonesia and English.
	Eleanor Jorgensen’s project investigates language variation and change in sign varieties used by the Hawai`i deaf community, focusing on documenting differences in the expression of temporal information. While the main language of the community is now American Sign Language (ASL), an earlier signing variety, labelled as ‘Hawai‘i Sign Language’ (HSL) was used prior to its introduction from the United States mainland in the mid 20th century. HSL is now known only by the oldest generation of signers and is not being acquired by deaf children. The project uses heritage video data recorded in 1999 and 2012 which has been preserved within the Hawai`i deaf community, and video data collected during fieldwork in 2024, to track how attitudes towards HSL and ASL have impacted language practices.
	Saurabh Kumar Nath: The DoCEA project (Documentation of Central and Eastern Assamese Dialects) aims to document Assamese spoken across thirteen districts of Assam in India, specifically focusing on the Central and Eastern Assamese dialects, building upon the first phase of fieldwork for the Assamese Dialectology Project (ADIP) at the Australian National University (2023-2026). The DoCEA project supports the broader aim of the ADIP, which is to systematically investigate the regional variation of Assamese vowels within their sociocultural contexts. A major goal of the ADIP is the creation of a speech corpus covering all the major dialect regions of Assamese. The DoCEA project contributes to this goal by collecting and transcribing speech data from Central and Eastern Assamese spoken regions.
	Stacey Sherwood & Dariush Izadi: We’re excited to share an update on our ALS-funded project, which delves into how people in Western Sydney perceive and respond to different ethnolects. After submitting our ethics application in mid-September, we’ve received positive feedback from the ethics committee and are hopeful for official approval soon. In the meantime, we’ve also been busy recruiting interns for the 2024 Undergraduate University Summer Research Scholarship Program to help us develop a key research tool for this project. With applications closed and several strong candidates in the mix, we’re looking forward to welcoming at least one intern to our team. Together, we’ll be crafting a perceptual dialectology tool that captures residents’ views on the local language landscape, setting the stage for data collection in early 2025. Ultimately, we hope to add new insights into how language shapes identity and social connections within our diverse community.
	Rebecca Holt: My project aims to assess the ability of children who use hearing aids or cochlear implants to discriminate between and identify talkers, and whether this relates to phonological awareness skills. The findings will better equip teachers and clinicians to facilitate communication for children with hearing loss in complex listening environments. This study will also provide a basis for future research investigating downstream effects of talker discrimination and identification on real-time language processing and speech-in-noise perception in this population.

The Jalwang Scholarship supports linguists to give back to the community by converting some of their research into materials of benefit to the language community. The recipient of this scholarship in 2024 is Katie Bicevskis for ‘Marri Ngarr dictionary project’.

Katie Bicevskis: Marri Ngarr dictionary project

This project aims to produce a preliminary dictionary of Marri Ngarr for use by community members living in and around Wadeye, Northern Territory. Marri Ngarr is no longer in daily use. However, a small group of Marri Ngarr community members have recently formed a small language group and are working hard to revitalise the language. The group are underfunded and would benefit greatly from more resources. They feel that a dictionary would be the most useful resource for them in their revitalisation efforts.

My PhD project, completed in 2023, was a grammatical description of Marri Ngarr. As part of the project, I created a FLEx database based on around 50hrs of transcribed Marri Ngarr recordings. This database was essential for linguistic analysis during my candidature, however in this format the language information is not very accessible for language learners, and my intention was always to use the information in the database to create something more useful for community members. Based on the Marri Ngarr language group's wishes, I will convert the information in the database into a Marri Ngarr dictionary, in collaboration with them. This dictionary will be considered "preliminary" in that it will be a relatively quickly completed, unpublished, printed dictionary that can be used in the early stages of the group's revitalisation efforts. It may form part of a longer-term project of completing a comprehensive, published Marri Ngarr dictionary. The Jalwang scholarship funds make it possible for me to take a fieldtrip to Wadeye to work in person with community members during the project.

The dictionary project will provide an opportunity for the Marri Ngarr language group to undertake focussed language work on Marri Ngarr, and the outcome will be a resource which can be circulated through the community, potentially inspiring more community members to get involved in efforts to revitalise the language.

The Gerhardt Laves Scholarship contributes to fieldwork expenses for postgraduate student researchers in Indigenous languages of Australia or its immediate region. The recipient of this scholarship is Shubo Li for ‘Prominence patterns in Nakanamanga’.

Shubo Li: My project will investigate the prominence patterns of Nakanamanga, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu. Previous linguistic records of Nakanamanga include a sketch grammar based on data collected with one speaker (Schütz, 1969) and associated materials, as well as some historical comparative studies. Many unresolved matters remain regarding the sound system of Nakanamanga, including prominence patterns. This project aims to produce a phonetically informed phonological analysis of Nakanamanga prominence patterns. The data to be collected include controlled speech data of words of different shapes and in different utterance frames, as well as naturalistic speech, and these data will be linked to community-oriented materials. The results of this project will make significant contributions to the description of Nakanamanga, to the understanding of linguistic relationships in central Vanuatu, and to the typological understandings of prominence patterns within the Oceanic language family and beyond.

The Susan Kaldor Scholarship supports ALS student members to attend an international summer school or institute. The 2024 recipient of this scholarship is Madeleine Clews.

Madeleine is doing a PhD entitled "A Historical Sociolinguistic Study of Australian English" and used the prize to attend the HiSoN (Historical Sociolinguistics Network) Summer School 2024 at Leiden University in the Netherlands in July 2024.

The Michael Clyne Prize (awarded jointly with the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) is awarded for the most outstanding postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. The 2024 recipient of this prize is Suzanne Grasso.

Suzanne Grasso’s thesis is entitled: "Multilingual development advice at the Maternal and Child Health Service" (Monash University, Supervised by Louisa Willoughby and Anna Margetts). Thesis abstract:
Educating parents about multilingual development at an institutional level is integral to supporting culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) families to develop their family language policy (FLP) and facilitate heritage language (HL) development. However, research in the field acknowledges that there are still significant gaps in health professionals’ understanding of the issues parents face while raising their children in their HL. This can impact the provision of professional advice around multilingual development and lead to marginalisation of HLs and eventual language shift. This thesis set out to identify the ways in which health professionals influence FLP for CALD families in Australia, focusing on the Victorian Maternal and Child Health (MCH) service. I present three case studies which are drawn from a wider dataset that includes 11 recorded MCH consultations between 12 nurses and 14 parents with children aged between 0 and 3.5 years, supplemented by individual follow-up interviews with parents, nurses, and their team leaders. I explore how and to what extent professionals and families discuss multilingual development, the barriers that can prohibit discussion around multilingual development, and ways to improve practice in this area."

The Barb Kelly Prize is awarded for the most outstanding postgraduate research thesis in any area of linguistics. Weijian Meng is the 2024 recipient of this prize.

Weijian Meng: My thesis (‘A Grammar of Saek’) presents the first comprehensive description of Saek, focusing on the variety spoken in upland valleys in Nakai District, Laos. Empirically grounded in natural language use, it emphasises narratives and conversations within dynamic social interactions, documented through sustained, monolingual fieldwork involving the whole community. Through this approach, the thesis not only describes the major grammatical components of Saek, including discourse-pragmatic systems such as sentence-final particles and expressive forms, but also offers rich cultural vignettes of Saek speakers through contextualised examples. The thesis also includes a wordlist and substantial texts, selected from an open-access multimodal corpus.

The Indigenous Conference Attendance Support scheme assists Indigenous presenters to attend the ALS annual conference. This grant has been awarded to Reuben Mellor from Gambadul Aboriginal Corporation, for a paper entitled ‘Genres of song to teach language and kinship for the Mayi and Mari in NSW’ (with Jesse Hodgetts and Jayden Kitchener-Wasters)

The Student Conference Attendance Support scheme assists ALS student presenters to attend the ALS conference. The has been awarded to Geordie Kidd for a paper entitled ‘Verb excorporation in four Gunwinyguan languages’.

Mentoring Scheme

The ALS Mentoring Scheme is being rebooted after a hiatus. This scheme aims to connect linguists who are seeking professional mentoring with experienced linguists who can provide advice and a sounding board for career development. It is open to all ALS members regardless of career stage or current employment status.

You can find out more and register as either a mentor or mentee at https://als.asn.au/Scholarships-Prizes/Mentoring. We are particularly looking for more mentors, especially those able to offer advice regarding non-academic activities.

If you have any questions, please contact Sasha Wilmoth, VP (Professional Development) at sasha.wilmoth@unimelb.edu.au.

ALS Social Media

ALS is now on Bluesky. We are @auslingsoc.bsky.social

News from the University of New England (UNE)

UNE linguists are excited by the warmer weather! We’re trying to steer clear of the magpies…

Awards

We’re proud to announce that Adjunct Professor Diana Eades is the very first recipient of the International Pragmatics Association’s Social Impact Award. IPrA’s website describes the award thus:

IPrA's Social Impact Award was recently established to honor a colleague who has used pragmatic methods or insights in work with non-academic communities, including public or private organizations, to raise awareness of communicative patterns and/or combat charlatanism regarding such patterns, in ways that achieve greater social justice).

Congratulations, Diana!

Launch

A belated congratulations to Dr Piers Kelly on the launch of the Australian Message Stick Database! You can visit the digital repository here: https://amsd.clld.org/

Visitors

In August, Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer from Chemnitz University of Technology visited UNE. She delivered a fascinating double-themed talk about 1. the development of the TransGrimm Corpus, a digital collection of the German fairy tales (with English translations), currently being compiled at Chemnitz University of Technology; 2. A corpus investigation into the extent to which Star Wars lexicon has become part of our everyday language. Thanks, Christina!

Interviews

UNE media recently published this great interview with lawyer-cum-linguist Dr Laura Smith-Khan: Meet Dr Laura Smith-Khan, senior lecturer in Law | Pulse news (une.edu.au)

Recent publications

Iyengar, Arvind V. (2024). Written into being: Colonial language epistemologies and the graphocentric straitjacket. In F. J. Ndhlovu & S. Ndhlovu-Gatsheni (Eds.), Language and decolonisation: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 114–135). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003313618-8

Akter, Mohammed Zahid, & Arvind V. Iyengar. (2024). Niche languages: Decolonising language use through domain specialisation and linguistic harmony. In F. J. Ndhlovu & S. Ndhlovu-Gatsheni (Eds.), Language and decolonisation: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 77–96). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003313618-6

Ndhlovu, Finex, Emmanuel Ngue Um, & Virginia Unamuno. (2024). Critical Sociolinguistics and the Imperative to Decolonise Language Studies. In Del Percio, Alfonso & Mi-Cha Flubacher (eds), Critical Sociolinguistics: Dialogues, Dissonances, Developments. Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/critical-sociolinguistics-9781350293526/

Completing HDR students

Hadi Kazwini successfully completed his Master’s thesis, ‘Passive Construction in Iraqi Arabic: Its formation and governing rules’ (Supervisor: Arvind Iyengar). Examiners lauded the originality of Hadi’s work, and commented that “the [passive formation] rule … posited is soundly derived from the data” and “indeed a very good mathematical rule”. Congratulations, Hadi!

Also Dr Rene Cornish has just been awarded her PhD, which explores how social media hate speech has been assessed in employment dismissal decisions in South Africa. The thesis title is: ‘Social Media Misconduct Dismissals in South Africa: Forms of Hate Speech in First-Instance Employment Decisions’. Congratulations to Rene.

In Memoriam

UNE Linguistics is saddened by the passing of Ruth Nicholls. Ruth made a significant contribution to TESOL and Languages Education during her long tenure at the Armidale College of Advanced Education and the UNE School of Education (1976-2013). She also helped to develop UNE Linguistics’ flagship MAAL (TESOL) degree. To read more about Ruth’s service to the field, see here.

Wish You Were Here!

PhD student Noémie Severin is currently on fieldwork in Vanuatu. She is pictured below, working with South Efate speaker, Lionel Emil.

Cindy Schneider

News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)

Teaching and Learning

In July, August and October CDU Linguistics held five weeks of workshops at the Darwin Casuarina Campus for First Nations students enrolled in the Diploma of Arts (Languages and Linguistics) and in short course offerings. Students attended from the Mid-West, Pilbara and Kimberly regions of WA, Central NSW and ACT, Central and Far North QLD, and Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait), to participate in workshops for the units IAS163 Introduction to Linguistics, IAS363 Language Planning for Revitalisation and Maintenance, TES204 Understanding Language Acquisition, and IAS364 Dictionary Making. For any queries about 2025 undergraduate linguistics unit offerings and study options for First Nations students, please get in touch with James Bednall (james.bednall@cdu.edu.au).

Participants at the IAS163 Introduction to Linguistics workshop in July (R-L: Aunty Kerry Charlton, Aunty Ethel Larry, Chanice Fleming, Lala Gutchen, Kristy Stewart, Trinity Clarke, Joan Ashburton, Breanna Kelly, Rosie Sitorus, James Bednall)

CDU is excited to offer a new Master of Applied Linguistics from 2025, with enrolments now open. The course is structured around four core units that lay the foundation by covering essential topics such as research methodologies, linguistic diversity in First Nations languages, second language acquisition, and global Englishes. Students have the opportunity to choose a coursework-based or research (thesis)-based stream in the program. There are also other postgraduate opportunities to study Applied Linguistics at CDU through a TESOL major in the Master of Education, Graduate Diploma of Specialist Education and Graduate Certificate of Specialist Education. For information about these offerings, please get in touch with Andrew Pollard (andrew.pollard@cdu.edu.au) or Raelke Grimmer (raelke.grimmer@cdu.edu.au).

Check out the CDU Linguistics webpage for news and updates on CDU Linguistics courses, teaching and research.

Current projects

The CDU project ‘Mathematics in Indigenous languages’ (MiIL) continues, led by CI Cris Edmonds-Wathen, working with James Bednall, alongside University of Melbourne collaborators Sasha Wilmoth and Kate Charlwood. The project is working with a number of First Nations language communities/schools to develop early primary mathematics teaching sequences in their languages. In the past couple of months:

Cris made two trips to Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic Primary School, Wurrumiyanga to work with Tiwi educators in August.
Cris gave a workshop for developing Warlpiri mathematics in Willowra for the Warlpiri Triangle Schools in August.
Cris and James made a trip to Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island, working with the Groote Eylandt Language Centre, Groote Eylandt Bickerton Island Primary College Aboriginal Corporation (GEBIPCAC), Umbakumba School, Milyakburra School and Angurugu Preschool in September.

In November the MiIL team will hold a multiday research workshop in Darwin for project participants from schools working with Pitjantjatjara, Anindilyakwa, Tiwi and Warlpiri.

Awni Etaywe has concluded his CDU Rainmaker Start-Up project ‘A semi-automated analysis of terrorist linguistic fingerprint online: Prediction, profiling, and tactics’ in collaboration with Professor Mamoun Alazab and Dr Kate Macfarlane.

Publications

Bird, S. (2024). Must NLP be Extractive? In L.-W. Ku, A. F. T. Martins, & V. Srikumar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Long Papers (Vol. 1, pp. 14915-14929). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). View

Etaywe, A. (2024). Discursive pragmatics of justification in terrorist threat texts: Victim-blaming, denying, discrediting, legitimating, manipulating, and retaliation. Discourse & Society, 35(6), 1-31. http://doi.org/10.1177/09579265241251480.

Etaywe, A., Macfarlane, K. & Alazab, M. (2024). A cyberterrorist behind the keyboard: An automated text analysis for psycholinguistic profiling and threat assessment. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00120.eta

Etaywe, A. (2024). Unmasking malicious stance indicators and attitudinal priming: An ‘evaluative textbite’ approach to identity attacks in violent extremist discourse. Corpus Pragmatics,1-32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-024-00172-3

Etaywe, A. (2024). Moral disaffiliation in cyber incitement to hatred and violence: A discourse semantic approach. Graham, R., Humer, S., Lee, C. & Nagy, V. (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook on Online Deviance (pp. 419-441). London & New York: Routledge.

Etaywe, A., Thomson, E., Wijeyewardene, I. (2024). Moving towards peace, compassion and empathy through semiotic inquiry. Language, Context and Text, 6(1), 2-26. https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00063.eta

Etaywe, A. (2024). Compassion as appraisal, performative identity and moral affiliation: A corpus perspective and digital activist strategic communication analysis. Language, Context and Text, 6(1), 88-121. https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00066.eta

Etaywe, A. (2024). Andy Curtis. The new peace linguistics and the role of language in conflict. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing Inc., 2022. xvi + 281 pp. Language, Context and Text, 6(1), 219-225. https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00071.eta

Etaywe, A. (2024). Conceptual burstiness in sociolinguistic profiling of radical-criminal communications: Corpus method-assisted meaning extraction for investigative leads. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10187-3

Thomson, E. A., Etaywe, A., Wijeyewardene, I. & Wheler, P. (2024). (Eds.). Language, Context and Text 6(1), (Special issue on Moving towards peace, compassion and empathy through semiotic enquiry). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Presentations

Bednall, James. 2024. An introduction to the diversity of First Nations languages in the NT, with some EAL/D considerations for teachers. ATESOL-NT Webinar. 17 October 2024, Darwin, NT.
Bednall, James. 2024. Aspectuo-temporal expression and interaction in Anindilyakwa. Colloque CHRONOS 15. 29-31 May 2024, Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. (Invited plenary). Abstract link ; Recorded presentation link.
Cameron, Annie. 2024. From Ambience to Access: understanding an Aboriginal community language archive through the Records Continuum Model. WA Branch of the Australian Society of Archivists’ AGM. 29 August 2024, Perth, WA.
Etaywe, A. 2024. The ‘Boycott Puma’ campaign communication: How BDS movement’s digital media narrative unites communities and promotes colonial resistance. (27 June 2024). International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR2014) Pre-conference. Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia.
Etaywe, A. 2024. An 'extremist appraisal signature' analysis for sociolinguistic profiling: Axiology, persona and style variation in threat and incitement texts. (24-27 June 2024). Sociolinguistics Symposium 25. Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Etaywe, A. & Thompson, E. 2024. Identifying and analysing language in use: Using the tools of systemic functional semiotics (SFS) in positive discourse analysis (18 July 2024). ASFLA Inc. Special Interest Group on the Semiotics of Peace, Compassion and Empathy.
Etaywe, A. & Wheeler, P. 2024. Perspectives on compassion in digital activism: Ideal victim, worthy victim, or systemic compassion? (3 July 2024). International Systemic Functional Congress (ISFC49). UNSW, Sydney, Australia.

Outreach

Awni Etaywe has attracted 188 media mentions with an estimated audience reach of 195.3 million for 2024 research findings.

Through a press release and wide media coverage he has contributed to the public’s awareness of how violent extremists manipulate language to justify violence, and how similar linguistic tactics are employed also by figures not typically seen as violent extremists – such as former President Donald Trump – to manipulate public perception and behaviour in contemporary media discourse. The research was featured in Associated Press, US National Times, European Global Times, and Innovation & Entrepreneurs News: ‘Victim-blaming, manipulation, and denial: How terrorists use language to justify violence’.

His work has also recently raised awareness about patterns of identity attacks in extremist language, highlighting how identity attacks serve as rhetorical tools to uncover violent intentions, and offering a novel investigative approach to identifying extremist content and detecting weaponised language online. This research has gained significant media attention and was featured in prominent outlets such as the National Tribune, Open Forum, and Cyber Daily.

New Roles

Awni Etaywe has been accepted as an Assessor in The European Science Foundation (ESF) College of Experts, specialising in cyber-mediated communication and forensic linguistics in social cyberterrorism.

Top End Linguistic Circle (TELC)

Linguists and language practitioners visiting Darwin are welcome any time to present at the Top End Linguistic Circle, which meets semi-regularly throughout the year. Get in touch with the committee at topendlingcircle@gmail.com or sign up to the mailing list to stay updated.

James Bednall

News from School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne

New publication

Kurmann, A., & Do, T. (2024). Documentary Film Memorialization of Vietnamese Indentured Labour France and New Caledonia: Sighting History. In N.H.C. Nguyen (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora (pp. 30-46). Routledge.

Award

In a ceremony in Ghent (Belgium) the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) won the prestigious Digital Preservation Award for Research and Innovation,

The innovative PARADISEC project – an initiative to improve access to and sustainability of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures - took the highly competitive Digital Repository of Ireland Award for Research and Innovation,

https://www.dpconline.org/news/dpa2024-winners

New appointments

The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence is pleased to announce the appointment of two new post-doctoral Research Fellows:

Dr Vincent Aubanel https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/1067461-vincent-aubanel

Dr Annina Heini https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/1096821-annina-heini

News from the University of Wollongong

HDR completions

Ibrahim Al Malwi (supervisors Alfredo Herrero de Haro and Amanda Baker). An Experimental Investigation of the Sound System of Abha Arabic.

Lilián Inés Ariztimuño (supervisors Shoshana Dreyfus and Alison Moore). The multi-semiotic expression of emotion in storytelling performances of Cinderella: A focus on verbal, vocal and facial resources.

Publications

Associate Professor Shoshana Dreyfus

Dreyfus, S. & Han, J. (2024) From empathy to activism: an analysis of a letter to the Minister which resulted in successful outcomes for a person with severe intellectual disability and their family. Language, Context & Text: The social semiotics forum, 6 (1), pp176-199.

Associate Professor Xiaoping Gao

Gao, X. & Wu, C. (2024). Research on Chinese character learning strategies as a second language: A systematic review （汉语作为第二语言汉字学习策略研究：系统性综述)，Research on International Chinese Education (国际汉语教学研究) ， 1，148-171.

Deng, L., Cheng, Y. & Gao, X. (2024). Promotional strategies in English and Chinese research article introduction and discussion/conclusion sections: A cross-cultural study, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 68, 101344.

Deng, L., Cheng, Y. & Gao, X. (2024). Engagement patterns in research article introductions: A cross-disciplinary study, System, 120, 103204.

Associate Professor Alfredo Herrero de Haro

Al Malwi, I., Herrero de Haro, A., & Baker A. (2024). Illustrations of the IPA: Abha Arabic. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 54 (1): 540-558.

Herrero de Haro, A. y Alcoholado Feltstrom, A. (2024). Anti-hiatus tendencies in Spanish: Rate of occurrence and phonetic identification. Linguistics 62 (1): 203-228.

Herrero de Haro, A. (2024). La extensión de la abertura vocálica de las vocales medias en Andalucía: análisis preliminar del Atlas Lingüístico interactivo de los acentos de Andalucía. Revista de Variación y Cambio Lingüístico 1 (1) 59 – 74.

Project updates

Alfredo Herrero de Haro continues his secondment at the Universidad de Granada (Spain), working on the project “Interactive Linguistic Atlas of Andalusian Accents”. The data collection phase has finished and audio has been collected from over 4200 speakers from over 520 locations in Andalusia (southern Spain) using a combination of online surveys and face-to-face interviews (1 speaker for every 2173 inhabitants of southern Spain). The audio is currently being edited and the analysis is due to start in early 2025. The software to represent the interactive linguistic atlas has already been developed and it will be available open access once the project is completed in December 2026.

Alfredo Herrero de Haro is presenting a weekly 15-minute segment on linguistics at Canal Sur Radio.

Shoshana Dreyfus continues to collect data for her Industry Partnership grant project: What makes it stick? A pilot project to explore the factors enabling adults living with severe intellectual disability and communication impairments to communicate multifunctionally

Shoshana Dreyfus

News from Macquarie University

Challenges for the undergraduate program in Linguistics

It has been a challenging period for the undergraduate program Linguistics at Macquarie. In 2023 the Faculty of Medicine Health and Human sciences paused enrolments in Bachelor of Linguistics and Language Sciences, a program that had been running since 2018. An undergraduate working group worked for twelve months to propose a new Bachelor of Linguistics. This proposal was rejected in June 2024. The working group is currently determining what the next moves should be. The department still hosts a very popular Bachelor of Speech and Hearing Sciences within which students may still take a substantial number of linguistics units. This unit is a feeder for postgraduate courses in Clinical Audiology and Speech and Language Pathology. At present however there is no dedicated undergraduate linguistics degree that would ordinarily feed into the postgraduate programs in Translating and Interpreting, Editing and Publishing and Applied Linguistics.

The Department of Linguistics 50th anniversary celebration

Fifty years ago Macquarie University’s School of English became the School of English and Linguistics. A celebration to mark the anniversary of this occasion will be held at the Arts Function Room (C122), 25 Wally’s Walk. This followed by drinks and canapes on Level 6, Rooftop Garden, from 5pm.

HDR News

Recent HDR completions

de Dear, C. (2024). Content-question words in Gija conversations [PhD dissertation]. Macquarie University. (supervised by Joe Blythe & Scott Barnes).

Caroline de Dear commences a postdoctoral fellowship at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, in November 2024.

Recent Publications

Blythe, Joe, Francesco Possemato, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear, Rod Gardner & Lesley Stirling. 2024. A satellite view of spatial points in conversation. In Pentti Haddington, Tiina Eilittä, Antti Kamunen, Laura Kohonen-Aho, Tuire Oittinen, Iira Rautiainen & Anna Vatanen (eds.), Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in motion: Emerging methods and technologies, 171–198. Abingdon: Routledge. https://10.4324/9781003424888-12.

Reed, M., Kharchenko, Y., & Bodis, A. (2024). Sustainability in English Language Teacher Education: Preparing teachers for an unknown future. In N. A. Nazari & A. M. Riazi (Eds.), Adaptable English Language Teaching: Advances and Frameworks for Responding to New Circumstances. Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003361701

Workshops

World English workshop

World English was the focus of an international gathering (23-24 September) at Macquarie University, under a trilateral research agreement with Fudan University (Shanghai) and the University of Hamburg. The meeting included an intensive workshop to discuss qualitative and quantitative data from 6 world Englishes, including those established in the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka, as well as emerging varieties in China, Indonesia and Germany.

Australian Languages Workshop

Blythe, Joe, Jeremiah Ngubidirr Tunmuck, Rapahel Wurdanmanthupirr Tunmuck & Jake Miller. 2024. Etic and emic approaches to research on Murrinhpatha spatial language. Australian Languages Workshop. Canberra, ACT.

New Roles

Assoc Prof Mike Proctor has been appointed the new Director of Research for the MQ Dept of Linguistics – Assoc Prof Mike Proctor.

Outreach

The Language on the Move research group started a podcast this year - the Language on the Move Podcast! The podcast is produced by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and PhD Candidate Brynn Quick. With over 25 episodes in the current catalogue, this podcast brings listeners conversations about linguistic diversity in social life. Members of the team chat with key thinkers in our field to explore ideas, debates, problems, and innovations. Our aim is to have in-depth and fun conversations about language learning, intercultural communication, multilingualism, applied sociolinguistics, and much more. The Language on the Move podcast is available on all podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Fellowships and awards

Mitch Browne has been awarded a Macquarie University Research Fellowship for the project 'The birth of new Australian Aboriginal Languages: the role of speaker identity in language genesis'. The Fellowship runs 2025-2029 and is sponsored by Mike Proctor and Joe Blythe.

Kelly Miles & Jörg Buchholtz, Scott Barnes and Michael Richardson (Psychology), have been awarded a William Demant Foundation grant to work with the Eriksholm Research Centre to map and predict communication breakdowns during conversations in noise. The project titled “Mapping the curve of communication breakdowns during conversations in noise” will provide new knowledge of the communication breakdown curve – along with the behavioural and physiological markers that predict communication breakdowns. It will provide an innovative approach to examine interactive communication and will deliver substantial conceptual and practical advancements in the development and evaluation of new hearing aids and signal-processing algorithms. The project is due to commence January 2025.

Joe Blythe

News from the University of Western Australia

Generative Artificial Intelligence Think Tank

Congratulations to Celeste Rodríguez Louro who has been appointed to UWA’s GenAI Think Tank through a selection process. Celeste’s appointment is motivated by her and Glenys Collard’s soon-to-be-announced research partnership with Google and Celeste’s commitment to sustainable innovation in Higher Education.

Welcome

Umberto Ansaldo has joined UWA Linguistics / Language Lab as an honorary Adjunct Professor.

Connor Brown has joined UWA Linguistics / Language Lab as an honorary Adjunct Research Fellow.

HDR student updates

PhD candidate Madeleine Clews is in the final stages of writing up her PhD thesis, ‘A historical sociolinguistic analysis of 19th-century Australian English, with a particular focus on the Colony of Western Australia 1829-1900’. This is a thesis by publication, with two works already published and a further three in advanced stages of preparation. Madeleine’s work has been greatly assisted by attending the 2024 Historical Sociolinguistics Network summer school in Cartagena, Spain, with the support of a 2024 ALS Susan Kaldor scholarship.

PhD Candidate Lucía Fraiese presented findings from her sociolinguistic ethnography at a First Nations boarding school at the ‘Cycles of Aboriginal English’ colloquium held at Sociolinguistic Symposium 25 in June 2024, followed by a conference paper on (ING) variability among First Nations youth at Methods in Dialectology XVIII in July 2024.

PhD Candidate Alex Stephenson completed his first year in September after a successful confirmation of candidature assessment. Alex also recently completed his first fieldwork trip, for which he was primarily based in Kununurra with Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language Centre (MDWg) for two months. Alex has been conducting interviews with language centre staff and community members to better understand post-digitisation futures.

PhD candidate Katharina Frödrich joined UWA Linguistics / Language Lab in March 2024 and recently had her research proposal approved. Katharina is the recipient of a Forrest Scholarship (4% success rate) which will allow her to design community-led participatory sociolinguistic research in the Pilbara. Katharina is supervised by Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Luisa Miceli and Sally Dixon (University of New England).

Staff updates

Connor Brown continues work in Kununurra as a community linguist at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture centre. Connor has also been collaborating with Dany Adone, Thomas Batchelor, and Anna Gosebrink at the University of Cologne on a grammar of the Kununurra variety of Kriol (expected later this year).

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway submitted the final corrections for her thesis, ‘Paradigm shift: a theoretical and descriptive study of Mudburra-Kriol contact’, to the University of Queensland graduate school in August. She is now awaiting final conferral of her PhD. Amanda is also teaching our second semester introductory unit and working remotely with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people through the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation in Karratha. Her role has a dual focus on training within the community and data management within the organisation.

Mitch Browne has recently been on fieldwork in Tennant Creek, working with the community to record Warumungu and Warlmanpa language; and has begun collaborating with Papulu Apparr-kari Aboriginal Corporation and Warlmanpa speakers to bring Warlmanpa onto the Feed the Monster app.

Grants completed

Celeste Rodríguez Louro’s ARC DECRA project titled Aboriginal English in the global city: Minorities and language change is now complete! A short summary of project outcomes is as follows:

This project was the first large-scale sociolinguistic study of variation and change in Aboriginal English, and the first sociolinguistic work to systematically tap into speakers’ everyday language through the culturally appropriate style of yarning. It gave rise to the 'Yarning Corpus' which features the voices of 58 Aboriginal English speakers born 1931-2009. Outputs included articles in top journals, book chapters, and multiple conference papers and invited keynote presentations, as well as pieces in The Conversation, podcasts, blogs, an award-winning radio segment, and a contracted book with Cambridge University Press. The project yielded exciting industry partnerships with the Oxford English Dictionary, the Heart Foundation, and Google. It also led to the launch of UWA's Language Lab.

https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/celeste-rodriguez-louro

Publications

Collard, Glenys & Celeste Rodríguez Louro (2024). From spark to flame: Decolonial linguistics and the creation of First Nations medical media. In Ndhlovu, F. & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (Eds.), Language and Decolonisation: New Interdisciplinary Conversations. London: Routledge. 207–221.

Kruk, Jessica. (2024) Framing shared knowledge: The chronotopic organisation of meaning, Language & Communication, 94, 13-27, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2023.11.001

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Glenys Collard (2024). The Yarning Corpus: Aboriginal English in Southwest Western Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 44(2/3): 1–17.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Glenys Collard (2024). Hearing the voices: Embracing diversity in the study of language in society. Voice and Speech Review 18(2).

Yacopetti, Eleanor & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2024. A semantic typology of emotion nouns in Australian Indigenous languages, The Australian Journal of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2024.2329890

Awards

Madeleine Clews is the winner of the 2024 Susan Kaldor Scholarship by the Australian Linguistic Society.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has won a 2024 Mid-Career Researcher Award by the School of Social Sciences, UWA. She is now in the running for a UWA Vice-Chancellor’s Mid-Career Researcher Award.

Conference presentations

T. Mark Ellison and Luisa Miceli presented a paper titled ‘The Facilitation and Inhibition of Shared Vocabulary in Picture-Naming’ at the 21st International Congress of Linguists (ICL), Poznań, Poland, 8–14 September 2024.
Lucía Fraiese presented a paper titled ‘Freakin swimming and everythink: Variable (ING) in youth Aboriginal English’ at Methods in Dialectology XVIII, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 1-5 July 2024 (with Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Collard, Matt Hunt Gardner and James Walker).
Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented ‘The story continues: Youth quotatives in contemporary Aboriginal English’ at Sociolinguistics Symposium 25, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. 24-27 June 2024 (with Glenys Collard, Matt Hunt Gardner, Glenys Collard and Lucía Fraiese).

Keynote presentations and invited workshops

In August 2024, Celeste Rodríguez Louro delivered a F2F invited talk titled ‘From spark to flame: Designing culturally safe medical media for First Nations people in Australia’ at the 2024 Aboriginal Health Conference, Fremantle by Rydges, Fremantle, Australia, 10-11 August 2024.

In August 2024, Maïa Ponsonnet delivered an invited workshop for the Victorian Aboriginal Language Teachers Alliance. The title of her presentation was ‘Mapping emotions onto the body, a new perspective on body parts’.

In late June 2024, Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro delivered a F2F invited keynote presentation at the 2024 Symposium of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA), Victorian College of the Arts. The title of their keynote presentation is ‘Hearing the voices: Embracing diversity in the study of language in society’.

In June 2024, Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard hosted an invited colloquium titled ‘Cycles of Australian Aboriginal English’ at Sociolinguistics Symposium 25, Curtin University, Perth, WA.

Accepted presentations at ALS 2024

Eleanor Yacopetti (Monash), Connor Brown and Maïa Ponsonnet have had their paper titled ‘Finding the wei: Spatial functions of ‘directional’ marker wei across Kriol varieties and in contact’ accepted for presentation at the 2024 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society to be held at the Australian National University later this year.

Visitors

Maïa Ponsonnet will be visiting UWA in December-January, following attendance at ALS 2024.

2026 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

UWA Linguistics / Language Lab are hosting the 2026 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. 1-4 December 2026, University Club, UWA Perth Campus. We look forward to seeing you in Nyungar Country.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

News from UTS (University of Technology Sydney)

(Newly Open Access) Grey, A. (2021) ‘Perceptions of invisible Zhuang minority language in Linguistic Landscapes of the People’s Republic of China and implications for language policy’ Linguistic Landscape 7(3). 259 - 284 https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.20012.gre .

Grey, A. (2024) Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs’ legislative inquiry into the provisions of the Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024. Submission number 52.

The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers' Network is running a series of blogs profiling members' research and opportunities for collaboration:

What’s new in research on multilingualism in court? (17 September 2024) https://www.languageonthemove.com/whats-new-in-research-on-multilingualism-in-court/
What’s new in “Language and Criminal Justice” research? (1 July 2024) https://www.languageonthemove.com/whats-new-in-language-and-criminal-justice-research/

Dr Laura Smith-Khan has moved from UTS to UNE.

Alexandra Grey

News from the University of Newcastle

Visits, visitors, and other news

In June Kiwako Ito presented two visiting lectures and colloquium talks at Notre Dame Seishin University, University of Kitakyushu, Waseda University and University of Tokyo, Japan: Which side are you on: Spatial term interpretation and perspective taking and What is happening in the Lab for Applied Language Science (LALS) at University of Newcastle, Australia. Jayden Macklin-Cordes spent January-February and June as a Sponsored Guest of the Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus USA, where he presented the invited talk Phylogenetic comparative methods in everyday typology: With a case study of Pama-Nyungan laminals in their ‘Changelings forum for historical sociolinguistics’. In April Bill Palmer presented the talk Sociotopography: The interaction of language, environment, culture and cognition at the University of Western Australia.

In September Bill Palmer along with PhD student Laurits Stapput Knudsen and other colleagues from the OzSpace project ran a day-long symposium on Factors that mediate between environment and spatial cognition at the 9^th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Università Europea di Roma, Italy. For more details see ‘News from OzSpace’ in this newsletter.

For the first half of the year Newcastle’s Lab for Applied Language Sciences hosted visiting scholar Zhong Lei from the Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing, China. Lei was in LALS to conduct research on Academic English Listening from Language Independent Practice Perspective and Listening Intake in EMI Class under Comprehensible Input Theory. Her visit was funded by the China Scholarship Council. During her stay Lei designed a survey questionnaire to be delivered to the Sino-Australia Joint Program students to investigate their academic listening input ability and their independent language practice ability, collected data, and wrote up the findings.

In March Maria Copot, postdoc morphologist at The Ohio State University, visited UoN as a Visiting Academic Affiliate. Together, Copot and Macklin-Cordes presented a two-part masterclass Thinking Like a Quantitative Modeller in the Lab for Applied Language Sciences.

In August Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer from the Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany, visited the University of Newcastle to discuss methods of analysing historical and modern German language corpora and the development of software to do so. While at Newcastle she presented the talk From Grimms’ fairy tales to Star Wars: Investigating the language of popular culture with corpora.

In September, University of Newcastle hosted doctoral researcher at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Victoria Oliha, visited the to conduct interviews with German heritage language speakers and monolingual English speakers as part of her project on the influence of societal context on register use and distinction in multilingual environments. She is part of a multi-national collaborative project involving Newcastle’s Jaime Hunt along with researchers from Singapore and Namibia, led by Oliver Bunk and co-led by Antje Sauermann and Heike Wiese at Humboldt University. During her stay, Victoria presented her work at the Social Sciences and Linguistics Seminar Series and the Lab for Applied Language Sciences.

Newcastle staff and students’ talks given in the Newcastle Social Science and Linguistics seminar series in 2024 have included Jaime Hunt & Sacha Davis Changing voices in Newcastle and the Hunter: Language ideologies, utility and attitudes in the German-speaking community; Laurits Stapput Knudsen Language and landscape: anchoring meaning in the environment; Alan Reed Libert Compiling a dictionary of Babm: Problems and challenges; and Jayden Macklin-Cordes Towards a phylogenetic typology of Australian nominal classification.

In September Bill Palmer was elected to the General Assembly of the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, replacing David Bradley as the Australian representative. Alan Libert has been appointed adjunct professor and research coordinator at the Department of English Language and Literature, Khazar University, Baku Azerbaijan, and also as a member of the NSW Regional Community Network, advising the government on multicultural matters.

PhD and Honours news

Page Maitland has submitted her thesis An investigation of language change and contact effects on verbal categories in languages of New Guinea. In July Fadhilah graduated with a PhD for her thesis An analysis of L1 and L2 interference in Indonesian L3 English writing. Congratulations to Page and Fadhilah. Laurits Stapput Knudsen is putting the finishing touches to his thesis Landscape, cognition, and language: A fieldwork-based investigation of inter- and intracommunity variation, schedule for submission in November. He is currently a Research Visitor at Lund University, Sweden.

Other PhD projects currently underway include: Mais Alsabayleh Variation in the morphological and phonetic form of English loanwords produced by speakers of Jordanian-Arabic in Jordan and in Australia; Condra Antoni Supporting student employability skills in an Indonesian university: Constructing identities through the implementation of English-medium instruction in engineering lectures; Alex Cowan Adult second language (English) acquisition and processing; Huo Jiawen Examining the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training in addressing phonetic fossilization facing Chinese EFL learners: An experimental approach; Suzan Makhloof 'Deya understand?': A phonological study of ESL Arab learners' listening comprehension of English weak forms; and Melgis Dilkawaty Pratama Exploring EFL student plagiarism: Insights from Islamic higher education in Indonesia.

New Honours projects started this year include Georgia Hore Linguistic politeness in the translation of manga (Supervisors Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan and Kiwako Ito); Joshua Osborn Collation and statistical analysis of gender/nominal classification systems in Australian languages (Supervisor Jayden Macklin-Cordes); and Nicholas Watson An instrumental phonetic analysis of Dhanggati (Supervisor Bill Palmer).

2024 Grants

German Speakers in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley: Migrants, Descents, and Language Legacies, 1849 to Present. $9,960. Funding body: Copley Bequest Grant, HCISS (with industry and community collaboration). Funds will go towards a forthcoming exhibition at Newcastle Museum (contributing $59,000). This is being led by Dr Jaime Hunt and University of Newcastle historians Dr Sacha Davis and Associate Professor Julie McIntyre.

Multilingual Emergency Warnings. QBL Media Pty Ltd. (CEO Tat Benerjee) and Kiwako Ito (University of Newcastle). Funding body: NSW Department of Enterprise, Investment and Trade Scheme: Natural Hazards Technology Program.

SBIR Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Services Challenge, Feasibility (Phase 1) & Proof of Concept (Phase 2). QBL Media, Pty Ltd. (CEO Tat Benerjee) and Kiwako Ito (University of Newcastle). Funding Body: NSW Department of Enterprise, Investment and Trade Scheme: Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) Program.

Selected recent publications

Books:

Gottlieb, Henrik, Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin, Alicja Witalisz, Keisuke Imamura & Jaime W. Hunt (eds.) 2025 (forthcoming). Anglicisms around the globe: Cross-linguistic studies on the impact of English. London: Routledge.

Harvey, Mark & Robert Mailhammer. 2024. Proto-Australian: Reconstruction of a common ancestor language. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Libert, Alan Reed. 2024. A dictionary of the artificial language Oz. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Journal articles and book chapters:

Carignan, Christopher, Juqiang Chen, Mark Harvey, Clara Stockigt, Jane Simpson & Sydney Strangways. 2023. An investigation of the dynamics of vowel nasalization in Arabana using machine learning of acoustic features. Laboratory Phonology 14(1)

Harvey, Mark, Nay San, Michael Proctor, Forrest Panther & Myfany Turpin. 2023. The Kaytetye segmental inventory. Australian Journal of Linguistics 43(1):33-68

Harvey, Mark. 2023. The Larrakia kinship terminology: Asymmetrical cross-cousin marriage and Omaha skewing. Oceania 93(2):109-136

Hunt, Jaime W., Bill Palmer & Arvind Iyengar. 2025 (forthcoming). The gender of nominal anglicisms across language families and regions: a typological study. In Gottlieb et al. (eds.)

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. 2025 (forthcoming). Contextualising ‘cardinals’: The semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan. Australia Journal of Linguistics

Krauße, Daniel, Catriona Malau & Bill Palmer. 2025 (forthcoming). Diagnosing serial verb constructions: The case of resultatives in Vurës. Oceanic Linguistics

Minai, Utako, Kiwako Ito, and Adam Royer. 2023. Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults. Journal of Child Language 3:1-21

Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby & Jonathon Lum. 2025 (forthcoming). Frames of Reference, variation, and sociotopography. In Eric Pederson & Juergen Bohnemeyer (eds.) The expression of space. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Papers in Conference Proceedings:

Libert, Alan Reed. 2024. On the meanings and functions of the Ande preposition i. In M. Mollaoglu & H. Ciftci (eds.) Proceedings of the 5th International Mediterranean Scientific Research Congress. NewYork: Liberty.

Libert, Alan Reed. 2024. Words for the planet Jupiter in artificial auxiliary languages. In G. Acar (ed.) Proceedings of the 3^rd International Cankaya Scientific Studies Congress. Ankara: IKSAD Publications.

Selected conference papers in 2024

Ito, Kiwako, Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, Wynne Wong, Pauline Welby, Thierno Aliou Diallo, Bayley Hegerhorst Mahony & Madeleine Lock. 2024. Non-hexagonal French and the processing of French object pronouns. Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Applied Linguistics (CAAL). (Montreal, Canada)

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, Tom Ennever, Jonathon Lum & Eleanor Yacopetti. 2024. Re-framing Frames of Reference: 30 years of Man and Tree. 9^th International Conference on Spatial Cognition. (Università Europea di Roma, Italy)

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. 2024. Environmental sensitivity and conceptual representations of geocentric spatial terms in Wik-Mungkan (Australia). 9^th International Conference on Spatial Cognition. (Università Europea di Roma, Italy)

Libert, Alan Reed. 2024. [keynote] Manisa in English-language fiction. 4^th International Conference on the Philosophy of Language, Literature, and Linguistics. (Celal Bayar University, Manisa, Turkey)

Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. 2024. Towards a phylogenetic typology of Australian nominal classification. Langues & Langage à la croisée des Disciplines. (Sorbonne University, Paris, France).

Palmer, Bill. 2024. Egocentric spatial encoding in languages with no left and right. Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2024. (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland).

Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Tom Ennever, Alice Gaby, Clair Hill, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Jonathon Lum & Eleanor Yacopetti. 2024. Factors in the interaction of environment and spatial cognition. 9^th International Conference on Spatial Cognition. (Università Europea di Roma, Italy).

Palmer, Bill & Kiwako Ito. 2024. Eye-tracking evidence on undifferentiated transverse axis interpretations of English spatial expressions. Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2024. (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland).

Bill Palmer

News from the University of Sydney

1. On 21 August, the 2024 University of Sydney Linguistics Lecture was presented by Myf Turpin and April Pengart Campbell, on ‘Kin, Country, Language, and Biota’ at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. An excellent evening was had by all.

2. Xiyao Wang has recently been awarded an ELDP grant (Individual Graduate Scholarship) for her project Documenting the endangered language (Ho Nte) She: a special focus on tone and speech prosody. The landing page of this project is here: https://www.elararchive.org/dk0812. It will last from 2024 to 2026. Xiyao will take a ten-month fieldtrip from Oct 2024 to July 2025 to visit the Ho Nte She villages in Guangdong Province of China, document their heritage language with audio and video recordings and investigate the tonal and prosodic phenomena of the Ho Nte language.

3. News from the Sydney Corpus Lab. The Sydney Corpus Lab aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia. Its mission is to build research capacity in corpus linguistics at the University of Sydney, to connect Australian corpus linguists, and to promote the method in Australia. Available online resources include a list of textbooks in corpus linguistics in various languages as well as playlists and blog posts on a variety of topics. The Sydney Corpus Lab is centrally involved in the Australian Text Analytics Platform and also hosts regular events.

New PhD student:

Lindsey Stevenson, Écriture Inclusive Use in Social Media (supervised by Monika Bednarek and Clara Sitbon)

Publications:

Bednarek, M. (2024) Analysing intra-textual patterns in corpus-assisted discourse studies. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 7: 43-62. https://doi.org/10.18573/jcads.113

Bednarek, M., Schweinberger, M. & K. Lee (2024) Corpus-based discourse analysis: From meta-reflection to accountability. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory [Ahead of print] https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2023-0104

Bednarek, M. & B. Meek (2024) ‘Whitefellas got miserable language skills:’ Differentiation, scripted speech and Indigenous discourses. Language in Society [FirstView article] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000994

Conference presentations:

13-15 September 2024: 16th American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference (AACL2024), University of Oregon, Eugene, USA: “Identity labels and semiotic processes: Combining corpus linguistics and linguistic anthropology” [Monika Bednarek and Barbra A Meek]

13-15 September 2024: 16th American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference (AACL2024), University of Oregon, Eugene, USA: “Accountability in corpus linguistics: A proposed framework and new tools for analysis” [Monika Bednarek, Martin Schweinberger, Kelvin Lee]

24-27 June 2024: Sociolinguistics Symposium 2025, Curtin University, Perth, Australia: “Salient features of Australian Aboriginal English(es) in the public sphere” [Samuel Herriman and Monika Bednarek]

4. Three recent publications from Nick Enfield:

A review essay about Unnaming Kroeber Hall, the recent book by Andrew Garrett (Berkeley Linguistics), about the legacy of pioneering American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:

Enfield, N. J. 2024. Cancelled: The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber’s anti-racist credentials have been posthumously challenged. The Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 2024. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-society/social-cultural-studies/the-unnaming-of-kroeber-hall-andrew-garrett-book-review-n-j-enfield/

An essay on the multifunctionality of linguistic practices as anchoring devices for action, status, and experience:

Enfield, N. J. and Zuckerman, Charles H. P. 2024. Moorings: Linguistic practices and the tethering of action, status, and experience. Current Anthropology, 65.3, 554-576. https://doi.org/10.1086/730187

A personal tribute to the memory of Gérard Diffloth, who passed away in 2023. This piece appears in a volume edited by Paul Sidwell, recently printed and soon to be available for download at the International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics website (https://icaal.net/):

Enfield, N. J. (2024) Gérard Diffloth: fieldworker, thinker, dreamer. In Austroasiatic Linguistics in honour of Gérard Diffloth (1939-2023). Edited by Paul Sidwell, pp. 8-10.

News from the Jawun Research Centre, Central Queensland University

Staff news

Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald is currently overseeing the production process of her new book A guide to gender and classifiers (Oxford University Press, March 2025, ISBN 9780198863601; DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863601.001.0001), in addition to working on a comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea and co-editing a special issue 'Linguistics in strange and familiar places' (Language Sciences), jointly with Anne Storch and Viveka Vellupilai. A co-edited volume Clause-chaining in the languages of the world (ed. Hannah S. Sarvsy and A. Y. Aikhenvald, Oxford University Press, c. 1048 pp, ISBN 9780198870319; DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870319.001.0001) is in production and will be published in November 2024.

Thanks to the internet connection and access to WhatsApp in Brazilian Amazonia, Alexandra continues her work with the extant speakers of the Wamiarikune dialect of Tariana in Iauaretê and São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas, Brazil) and also Gramado (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), providing materials for the Tariana school Enu Irine Idakini in Iauaretê. She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, which were severely affected by the recent earthquake. She also continues her work as a member of the Expert Committee for the World Atlas of Languages (WAL) at UNESCO, supplying materials on endangered languages of her areas of expertise, and continues performing her duties as the first-named editor of the series Brill's studies in language, cognition, and culture (in addition to numerous other editorial responsibilities, podcasts, and interviews). She also chairs the Nominations Committee in the Jawun Research Centre. She continues her work as Etymology consultant for South American languages, for Oxford English Dictionary (c. 2 entries a month). Her interview in the magazine Lingvazin (Montenegro, 2018) ‘Lingvistički rasizam je najgori neprijatelj ugroženih i manjinskih jezika’ and ‘Magija imena: perspektiva terenskog istraživača’ (in Montenegrin) will be published in a special volume later in 2024.

Her upcoming plenary presentations (via zoom and in person) are:

• ‘The reality of evidentiality', 24-25 October 2024, International Conference 'Reality and evidentiality: language, cognition, society', Cyprus.
• 'Becoming an albino: fieldwork in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea', 25-26 November 2024, RAN Academy of Sciences.
• ‘Dare to be different: linguistic diversity and change in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea’. A plenary address at Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Germany, University of Mainz, 4-7 March 2025
‘Navigating knowledge: the ways of speaking and the dynamics of information source’. A plenary address at the Workshop ‘Linguistic variation and change meet anthropology: Investigating ways of speaking in cultural contexts’. Convened by Dr. Svenja Völkel & Prof. Nico Nassenstein (JGU Mainz), 4-7 March 2025.
‘The legacy of youth: The legacy of youth: young people’s languages and speech styles’, Plenary address at the 14th International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies, Tartu, Estonia, August 2025.

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is continuing his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendants of the Yidinji speakers, 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. His new monograph The anatomy of avoidance: A full story of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal 'mother-in-law language', with a foreword by Professor Adrian Miller, a proud member of the Jirrbal nation and DVP Indigenous at CQU, has been sent off for publication to De Gruyter (Berlin) (120,000 words; to appear in early 2025).

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

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

Dr Pema Wangdi, an expert in Brokpa and other Bhutanese languages and Adjunct Research Fellow at Jawun, continues working on the revision of his PhD, a comprehensive grammar of Brokpa.

Dr Christoph Holz, an expert on Oceanic languages of New Ireland, is finalising his fieldwork in New Ireland (PNG) within his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Naples L’Orientale, Department of Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean, “Documentation of two Oceanic languages of New Ireland: Lavatbura-Lamusong and Konomala". He is currently working on revising his PhD for publication.

Dr Françoise Daquin, an expert in French history and literature, continues her work. on French settlers in Queensland.

Dr Tahnee Innes, a member of the Yawuru nation (WA), an expert in cultural anthropology and museum studies, with a focus on Jirrbal culture and heritage, continues her work on Dr Ernie Grant’s life and heritage.

Professor Chia-jung Pan, Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Linguistic Sciences of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, China, an expert on Taiwanese languages, is working on evidentiality across the languages of China, preparing an edited volume.

Visiting scholar in 2025

Dr Katarzyna I. Wojtylak (PhD James Cook University, 2017) is a Research Fellow at the University of Warsaw and an expert on Witotoan languages and other languages of Colombian Amazon. She is planning to spend some time as a Visiting Fellow at the Jawun Research Centre in January-February 2025 working on language contact across Amazonia and issues in fieldwork with minority languages, in collaboration with Professors Aikhenvald and Dixon. A conference on these issues is being planned, to coincide with her visit.

New Publications by Members of the Cluster (April-September 2024)

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. 'Trade, mines, and language: the Chinese in Papua New Guinea' The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future, Edited by Anna Hayes, Rosita Henry, and Michael Wood. Canberra: the ANU Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/CPNG.2024

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024.‘Linguistic typology in action: how to know more’, In Reflections on theoretical linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, Volume 50 Issue 1-2 - Reflections on Theoretical Linguistics; Issue Editors: Hans-Martin Gärtner, Manfred Krifka, pp. 23-41.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. ‘Serial verbs and event plausibility in Tariana from Northwest Amazonia’, in The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics, edited by Alireza Korangy. Singapore: Springer, pp. 833-848.

Daquin, Françoise. 2024. Slavery and Feminism in the Writings of Madame de Staël, Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 9783969392010. [see here for the summary of the book]

Multidisciplinary Seminar Series (Jawun Research Centre)

This multidisciplinary seminar series centered in the Jawun Research Centre is intended for researchers at CQU, across Queensland and all over the world, as a forum to share their research findings and establish potential synergies, leading to joint grant applications, and partnerships that endeavour to advance knowledge in various disciplines. So far we have had over 50 seminars (starting late 2021).

Seminars take place on Wednesdays, 3pm – 5 pm Qld time, face-to-face CQUniversity, CBD Cairns, Corner Abbott Street and Shield Street, or via zoom (times may change).

Upcoming seminars late 2024:

Wednesday 2 October, Julie-Anne Rogers Cultural Wisdom: Reframing Research Through a BlaK Lens’
Tuesday 5 November, Greg Pratt (Jawun Research Centre/OIE)’ Implementation Science Evolved: Better Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research’
Wednesday 4 December, Dr Lydia Mainey, Topic to be announced.
Wednesday 11 December, Dr Fiona Wirrer-George First Nations Methodologies and Creative Practice - The Call of Lineage - A Living Epistemology

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

A new Seminar series, CLASS (Cairns Linguistics and Anthropology Seminar Series), convened by Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Professor Rosita Henry, and Professor R. M. W. Dixon, meets once every six weeks. The talks presented between April and September 2024 are:

2 May 2024, Dr Maria Wronska-Friend. Polish emigrant culture.
23 May 2024, Prof Rosita Henry. Indi-Kindi: An Ethnographic Case Study of an Indigenous Early Childhood Education Program.
19 September 2024, Dr Bartholomew Dean (University of Kansas) Inner Voice & the End of the Future: language & memory in post-conflict Peruvian Amazonia.

Expressions of interest to present a talk in the series on topics in linguistic anthropology and/or anthropological linguistics can be sent to

To enquire about the new developments and opportunities in the Research Cluster, write to Alexandra at a.aikenvald@cqu.edu.au or a.y.aikenvald@live.com

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

News from the ANU

Congratulations

Laura Arnold has joined CHL as Lecturer in Linguistics. Laura is a documentary, descriptive, and historical linguist whose research focusses on the languages of west New Guinea. Her PhD was a descriptive grammar of Ambel, an Austronesian language of the Raja Ampat archipelago. She has since worked on aspects of phonological and morphosyntactic change in the region, in particular the role played by contact.

Kevin Windle and Elena Govor were shortlisted for the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) 2024 Medal for Excellence in Translation, for their book 'Voices in the Wilderness'. Further details here.

Anna Wierzbicka has been ranked among world’s top 5 linguists. Clif through this article to read about this news.

Mary Dahm was selected as a 2024 ACT Young Tall Poppy by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. She was also awarded the inaugural ACT Health CHARM Rising Stars Award for Consumer Engagement Research from ACT Health and Canberra Health Services.

Naijing Liu was awarded a small grant from the Endangered Language Fund & International Phonetic Association (IPA) for her project 'Documentation of Tsum, Nepal.'

2024 Paul Bourke Award Lecture

As a recipient of a 2023 Paul Bourke Award for Early Carer Research by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Denise Angelo presented a public lecture this year, together with Indigenous language researchers from around Australia.

The lecture was focused on why seeing a fuller picture of contemporary First Nations language landscapes matters for achieving practical goals in Indigenous languages, education and other policy areas. Indigenous researchers offered windows onto their local language histories, their contemporary language situations and their language work.

Speakers included: Carmel Ryan (Ltentye Apurte NT), Bernadine Yeatmen (Yarrabah Qld), Marmingee Hand (Fitzroy Crossing WA), Tara Bonney (Mt Gambier SA) and Jasmine Seymour and Corina Norman (Sydney).

This lecture is based on research supported by ARC grant, 'Understanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language ecologies', undertaken with Carmel O’Shannessy and Jane Simpson (ANU), Susan Poetsch (USyd) and Sally Dixon (UNE).

HDR News

Congrats to Saliha Muradoǧlu for her PhD entitled 'Leveraging computational methods for morphological description: A case study of Nen'. Supervisory panel: Nick Evans (chair), Danielle Barth, Hanna Suominen, Mans Hulden. Read more about her PhD journey here.

Congrats to Zara Maxwell-Smith on her PhD ‘How do teachers of Indonesian choose what to teach? Computational tools to explore usage patterns’. Supervisory panel: Hanna Suominen (Chair), Danielle Barth, Michelle Kohler, Simón González Ochoa, Wayan Arka and Inger Newburn. Zara now has a lecturer position at UNSW Canberra.

CHL and SLLL welcome our new PhD students: Elliott Gore (A grammar of Nä/Namo (Morehead District, PNG); Daniella Haber (Historical linguistics of Bunaban languages); Joe (Pun-Ho) Lui (Typological diversity of Papuan languages); Meheyrin Chowdhury (Health Communication) Liuhuan Qin (Emotions in Zhuang Mountain Songs: A Linguistic Perspective); Safiah Almurash (A sociolinguistic investigation of /K/ and /Q/ in the Rbigh Village Dialect).

Daniella (Ella) Haber: Ella’s PhD project is the historical-comparative reconstruction of Proto-Bunuban, the putative ancestor of the Bunuban languages Bunuba and Gooniyandi spoken in the south-central Kimberley, WA. Her research focuses on the phonological, morphological and semantic divergences that have shaped the historical development of the Bunuban languages through time, as well as the neighbouring languages in the Kimberley region.
Elliott Gore: Eliott’s PhD project is to document and describe Namo, a Yam language spoken by around 300 people in Western Province, in Papua New Guinea. The project will involve the documentation of linguistic behaviour and the descriptive analysis of the linguistic structure of the language, with the goal to produce a linguistic grammar and a dictionary of around 3000 words.

Keira Mullan, a 2nd year PhD student working on Simalur, a Barrier Islands language spoken on Simeulue Island, Indonesia, recently she completed a 10-week research visit at the Surrey Morphology Group working on a typology of number and gender in Kadu languages as well as a morphological reconstruction of Proto-Kadu with Prof. Matthew Baerman.

While in Europe Keira attended the Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where she presented an oral presentation titled ‘The place of the Barrier Islands Languages inside Austronesian: Evidence from Contemporary Simalur’ and also presented an online presentation with Kira Davey at the World Congress of African Linguistics titled ‘A quantitative study of gender assignment in Kufo nouns.’

The Barrier Islands Languages Project

Keira Mullan recently received two grants to support her fieldwork on Simeulue Island: the Ruth Daroesman Graduate Study Grant and the Firebird Anthropological Society Research Grant.

Keira will be leaving to begin her major PhD fieldwork trip to Simeulue in Indonesia in October 2024. Her PhD project is part of the ARC-funded project (2023-2027) on Barrier Islands Languages led by Prof. Wayan Arka.

Emma Keith recently conducted a month-long scoping trip to the Mentawai Islands, accompanied by Sipora Mentawai speaker and research assistant Sumario Tatubeket and, for the first week, BRIN research official Prof Obing Katubi. Emma’s PhD project is also part of the ARC-funded project on Barrier Islands Languages led by Prof. Wayan Arka. Emma gathered a little over 17 hours of video material in several Mentawai varieties (chiefly Sipora, Sabirut, and Rereiket), which she and Sumario are now sorting through, translating, glossing, and using to build a corpus for my grammar writing project and lexicon for potential future lexicographic work. The videos principally consist of naturalistic conversation, descriptive procedures showcasing elements of everyday life, exposition about Mentawai culture, and folktales. They also used the trip to make connections with current and up-and-coming leaders in the Mentawai community, including a discussion session with the Mentawai University Students' Association in Padang on the Sumatran mainland. Several members of the forum are now involved in the project as regular grammar and vocabulary consultants. Elicitation sessions with these consultants to better understand some of the bones of Mentawai grammar, such as voice, aspect/mood, and pronominal marking, are ongoing until she returns to the Mentawais next year, so that her understanding of the grammatical system of Mentawai as well as its lexicon can be built up dynamically and continuously.

George Lindsay (supervisor Wayan Arka) joined the PhD program at the College of Asia and the Pacific in February 2024. His thesis is a grammar of Kimaghama, a Kolopom (Trans-New Guinea) language spoken on Kolopom Island in South Papua Province, Indonesia. The Kolopom languages are unique among the languages of southern New Guinea for their near-isolating morphological profiles. A description of one of these languages should enable further discussion on the linguistic history of southern New Guinea and language contact and change in the Papuasphere more broadly. George has just embarked on a two-month scoping trip to Merauke and Kolopom Island where he will begin to compile an audio-visual corpus and build an ongoing relationship with the speech community.

Wayan Arka presented three papers earlier this year, one being a keynote speaker:

Unraveling (a)symmetry in grammar: reciprocity and reflexivity in Barrier Islands languages and beyond: Wayan Arka. Invited presentation at KOLITA 22 (The 22nd Annual Atma Jaya Linguistic Conference), Atma Jaya Catholic University, 28-30 May 2024.
Enggano middle voice: Evidence of Enggano as an Austronesian language: Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg, Charlotte Hemmings, and I Wayan Arka. 16-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics), De La Salle University, Manila, 20-24 June 2024.
The multifunctionality and typological properties of Balinese Middle Voice ma-. Ni Wayan Sumitri and I Wayan Arka. 16-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics), De La Salle University, Manila, 20-24 June 2024.

Enggano Project

Wayan Arka's Enggano Project, in collaboration with Prof. Mary Dalrymple (Oxford University), is set to conclude in January 2025. The project’s completion will be celebrated with a one-day seminar at Udayana University, followed by a team visit to Enggano Island to present the project’s outcomes, including Enggano textbooks for primary and secondary schools and a multilingual Enggano dictionary in both print and digital formats.

Throughout the documentation project, the team recorded traditional stories and linguistic data in collaboration with Enggano elders and younger speakers. They have collected over 100 hours of recordings, with metadata and annotations, preserved through a dedicated project website and archival repositories. The research has advanced understanding of Enggano’s Austronesian connections, contributing to typological and historical linguistic discussions. One of the major achievements includes the creation of a searchable diachronic lexical database, EnoLEX, along with a mobile dictionary app for the Enggano community. Additionally, the project developed educational materials for teaching Enggano in local schools and empowered local researchers to ensure the continuity of documentation and revitalization efforts for future generations. Full details of the project are available at Enggano Project website.

Wayan is currently working on the Barrier Islands Language Project, funded by the ARC (2023–2027). This follow-up project builds on and expands the research conducted on Enggano to include other languages of the Barrier Islands region.

LDaCA ANU Team news

Anisa Puri is an oral historian who has worked on several Australian oral history projects within and beyond academia, prior to joining the ANU LDaCA team in February. Anisa is managing a new project seeking to identify precarious oral history collections in Victoria. She, Catherine and Gan gave a presentation on the value of oral histories for linguists at the Forum on Englishes at La Trobe University in August.

Gan Qiao is leaving ANU in October to take up a 2.5-year position as a postdoctoral Fellow at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury. He will be working on a Marsden Fund project titled: “Does machine-assisted writing erase linguistic diversity?”, led by Ben Adams (University of Canterbury), Jonathan Dunn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Andrea Nini (University of Manchester).

Li Nguyen was a post-doctoral fellow with LDaCA in 2023. She is now working as an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where she is teaching courses on ‘Bilingualism’ and on ‘Intercultural Communication’. She is currently working on several funded projects looking at language contact situation between different ethnic groups in Singapore, on Vietnamese heritage language, and on building educational technologies for code-switching.

Li and Catherine recently co-edited an AJL special issue on ‘Language Corpora in Australia’ (https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=cajl20), which presents the first of a new type of ‘data article’ for the AJL.

Wolfgang Barth has developed a series of Jupyter Notebooks that can help with data processing for corpus work, including tasks such as editing file names on bulk; cleaning up unwanted symbols; converting elan files to csv format. These Notebooks are available here. Please contact Wolfgang.Barth@anu.edu.au if you have any questions

In ANU PARADISEC news:

Julia Miller is currently in Europe, presenting at the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Annual Conference in Valencia, Spain (one paper on some new workflows she has been helping to put in place for PARADISEC, including for the video ingest process, and another on getting archiving and data management into tertiary education curricula – see presentations here. She also represented PARADISEC in Ghent to receive the Digital Repository of Ireland Award for Research & Innovation Award. Submission can be viewed here.

Rosey Billington is currently working on various projects relating to phonetic typology and sociophonetics. Current PhD student projects include work by Shubo Li on the Nakanamanga language of central Vanuatu, drawing on archival materials in PARADISEC as well as new fieldwork data, and work by Thomas Powell-Davies on aspects of the Mitchell and Delbridge corpus of Australian English (available via LDaCA), in connection with a project focused on Australian English in Tasmania.

NSMLab@anu

Zhengdao Ye delivered a keynote ‘What can gendered address forms in Chinese social media tell us about contemporary Chinese cultural ethos and mechanisms of linguistic innovation? A semantic inquiry’ at the Sinologists in Bydgoszcz: The 2nd International Conference on Chinese Languages, Literature, and Culture (17-18 May). She gave a masterclass on Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a Heuristic Tool for Exploring Meaning, Thought and Culture at the Universytet Kazimierza Wielkiego (May 16). She was also an invited speaker at the International Symposium on ‘The Making of US: Social Categories in Intercultural Pragmatics’ sponsored by Aarhus University (22-23 May).

Assistant Professor Anna Sroka from the Universytet Kazimierza Wielkiego is visiting the lab under an EU’s Regional Excellence Initiative grant, working with Zhengdao Ye on topics relating to language, emotion and culture.

Zhengdao Ye has received a Hansen Scandinavian Friendship Endowment (travel) grant from the ANU to enable ‘Danish in the Making’ researchers to visit the ANU and to hold a symposium on language and migration in 2025.

Field Methods course

Field Methods in Linguistics ran as an intensive two-week course in the Spring break. This year we worked with Alex Ginet, a native speaker of Megiar, which is an undocumented Oceanic language (closely related to Takia) spoken in Madang Province, PNG. Students and speaker alike were enthusiastic and fully engaged with the project, and we covered a lot of ground. Data collection is ongoing—we'll upload the corpus of Megiar recordings to PARADISEC in the next few weeks.

Publications

A new Warlpiri book, Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle , was published in May 2024 and celebrated in Lajamanu Community in July. The book documents a ceremonial song cycle situated within the traditional kurdiji “shield” ceremony, as sung by Warlpiri Elder Henry Cooke Anderson Jakamarra at Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2013. Documentation is by Jerry Jangala Patrick, Steven Japanangka Dixon, Stephen Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu Jampijinpa Patrick, Carmel O'Shannessy and Myfany Turpin.

Asako, Shiohara, & Arka, I Wayan. 2024. Bali-Lombok-Sumbawa languages. In Antoinette Schapper & Sander Adelaar (Eds.), Oxford University Guide to Malayo-Polinesian languages of Southeast Asia, 489-505. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gasser, Emily, Laura Arnold & David Kamholz, 2024. The languages of Halmahera, Raja Ampat, and west New Guinea. In Antoinette Schapper and Alexander Adelaar (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 621-659,.

Besemeres, Mary (2024). "Australian Multilingual Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A Survey." Journal of Literary Multilingualism 2: 270–288.

Besemeres, Mary. "Transcultural Perspectives in Journalist Memoirs of Growing Up with Non-Anglo Migrant Parents." Journal Of Australian Studies Vol. 48, No. 2, 230–247.

Dahm, M. R., Chien, L. J., Morris, J., Lutze, L., Scanlan, S., & Crock, C. (2024). Addressing diagnostic uncertainty and excellence in emergency care—from multicountry policy analysis to communication practice in Australian emergency departments: a multimethod study protocol. BMJ Open, 14(9), e085335.

Dahm, M. R. (2024) At the core - communication as a key to patient safety. Clinical Communiqué, 11, 12-14. https://www.thecommuniques.com/post/clinical-communiqu%C3%A9-volume-11-issue-2-june-2024

Dahm, M., Chien, L., Dalton, B., Fagan, M., Hallam, L., Thomson, S., Williams, M., Basseal, J., Bergen, P., Lawless, A., Markoff, S., Osborne, B., & Wale, J. (2024). What a difference consumers make. Health Advocate, August, 10-12.

Jones, Caroline, Jesse Tran, Eleanor Jorgensen, Romi Hill, Patricia Ellis, Jane Simpson, Felicity Meakins, Ben Foley, Marcel Reverter-Rambaldi, Gari Tudor-Smith, Paul Williams, Clair Hill, Mark Richards. 2024. WordSpinner: Developing a tool to convert plain-text lexicon files into dictionary webpages. Language Documentation & Conservation 18: 109-131.

Mount, Alison L, Barker, Jimmie, Barker Jr, Roy, Sedran-Price, Cassandra, Higgins, Michael, Barker, Lorina L, Staggs, Barton & Jane Simpson (2024). The Jimmie Barker corpus: A Muruwari man’s documentation of Aboriginal languages, history and culture between 1968 and 1972. Australian Journal of Linguistics, Vol 44:1–23.

O’Shannessy, Carmel. 2024. The longitudinal corpus of language acquisition, maintenance and contact: Warlpiri & Light Warlpiri. In Travis, Catherine and Li Nguyen (Ed.). Language Corpora in Australia: Special Issue – Australian Journal of Linguistics. 1-19.

Wang, Yizhou, Carmel O’Shannessy, Vanessa Davis, Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen, Joshua Roberts, Denise Foster. 2024. Production and perception of stop voicing in Central Australian Aboriginal English: A cross-generational study. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 44 (1), 69-98.

Travis, Catherine E. 2024. Sydney Speaks Corpus: An overview. Australian Journal of Linguistics (Special Issue on Language Corpora in Australia). 44(2-3).

Travis, Catherine E. and Li Nguyen (eds). 2024. Special issue on Language Corpora in Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 44 (2-3).

Wierzbicka, Anna (2024). Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural misunderstandings around the concept of ‘hell’. In A. Korangy (ed.), The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics. Springer, 553-577.

Ye, Zhengdao (2024). The cultural pragmatics of “danger” in Chinese political discourse. In Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 194-216.

Zhengdao Ye and Wayan Arka

News from Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre

Miriwoong Learning Book

In August 2024, we launched our Miriwoong Learning book! This book was written by Mirima staff and Henry Leslie-O’Neill, a PhD student from the Australian National University. Henry worked very closely with Miriwoong speakers to work out what people need to know to start speaking Miriwoong. The book introduces the basics of Miriwoong grammar using easy to understand explanations. The book is available in both English as The book for learning Miriwoong and Kriol as Dijan boog bla lernem Miriwoong. Currently, the Miriwoong community is testing the book out, and soon we hope to create a second edition, which will be available for sale.

Recently two of the Language Nest’s Language Education Officers; Che Kelly, Ingrid Ningamara and the Older Years Language Education Facilitator, Larissa Shihoff, flew to Canberra for the Australian Languages Workshop (ALW) run by the AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages (ACAL) and the Australian National University. Che and Ingrid presented on the combined work of all the Mirima teachers with a PHD student, Henry Leslie-O’Neil, to create multilingual Miriwoong language learner guides, in Miriwoong language, Miriwoong Kriol and English.

The ALW provides a forum for people working on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages (including both traditional and new varieties) to collaborate with their peers on their research and projects and discuss their achievements and challenges.

Tracey Stranger

News from OzSpace

Symposium

In September members of the OzSpace team ran a day-long symposium Factors that mediate between environment and spatial cognition within the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition at the Università Europea di Roma. The symposium brought together recent cognitive and linguistic findings from current research from investigators in disciplines ranging from anthropology and phenomenology to linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. These included novel findings in wayfinding, mental maps, environment-anchored toponyms, motion, cultural adaptation, gesture, pointing practices, and sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field, including new data from Indigenous Australia, Central and South America, the Middle East, and North Asia.

OzSpace team members’ papers in the symposium included:

Ennever, Tom. Pointing practices amongst Kukatja speakers and what they reveal about underlying preferences in spatial cognition.

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput, Tom Ennever, Jonathon Lum & Eleanor Yacopetti. Re-framing Frames of Reference: 30 years of Man and Tree.

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. Environmental sensitivity and conceptual representations of geocentric spatial terms in Wik-Mungkan (Australia).

Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Tom Ennever, Alice Gaby, Clair Hill, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Jonathon Lum & Eleanor Yacopetti. Factors in the interaction of environment and spatial cognition.

Other papers in the symposium included:

Bohnemeyer, Juergen, Katharine T. Donelson, Elena Benedicto, Alyson Eggleston, Alejandra Capistrán Garza, María de Jesús Selene Hernández Gómez, Néstor Hernández Green, Samuel Herrera Castro, Randi E. Moore, Carolyn K. O’Meara, Enrique Palancar, Gabriela Pérez Báez, Gilles Polian & Rodrigo Romero Méndez. Reference frames in Mesoamerica: Evidence of cultural evolution.

Cerqueglini, Letizia. Spatial language, cognition, and environment across Negev Arabic Tribal varieties.

Fernandez Velasco, Pablo. Mental maps and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters.

Hansen, Magnus Pharao. Semantic content and informational values of Nahuatl toponyms: A possible role in cultural adaptation to landscape?

Meakins, Felicity, Joseph Kirschvink, Shinsuke Shimojo, Daw-An Wu, Lara Krisst & Isaac Hilburn. Geocentric languages and the perception of the earth’s magnetic field.

Obert, Karolin & Niclas Burenhult. Between brain and terrain: Investigating linguistic representation of environments during motion.

O’Meara, Carolyn & Oscar Castillo Tapia. Generic landscape terms in Seri placenames and how well they correspond with the places being named.

Shapero, Joshua. When up is down and down is up: Local topography, landmarks and absolute Frames of Reference in Ancash Quechua spatial language. (University of New Mexico)

Other OzSpace team publications:

Ennever, Tom. 2024. Topics in a spatial grammar of Kukatja. PhD Thesis: Monash University. https://doi.org/10.26180/25777944.v1

Ennever, Tom & Alice Gaby. In press. Non-verbal predication in Ngumpin-Yapa languages. In D. Creissels, P. Bertinetto & L. Ciucci. Oxford handbook of non-verbal predication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ennever, Tom, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Eleanor Yacopetti, Alice Gaby, Joe Blythe & Bill Palmer. 2024. Ozspace protocol for the 'Man and Tree' spatial elicitation task. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RD59C

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. Forthcoming. Contextualising ‘cardinals’: The semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan. AJL [accepted for publication]

Palmer, Bill, Alice Gaby & Jonathon Lum. In press. Frames of Reference, variation, and sociotopography. In Eric Pederson & Juergen Bohnemeyer (eds.) The expression of space. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Yacopetti, Eleanor, Laurits Stapput-Knudsen & Tom Ennever. In press. Posture verbs in locative and existential predication across three Australian languages. In Rodolfo Basile, Josefina Budzisch & Chris Lasse Däbritz (eds.) Locative and existential predication – core and periphery. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Yacoptti, Eleanor & Maïa Ponsonnet. 2024. A semantic typology of emotion nouns in Australian Indigenous languages. AJL 44(1):29-68.

Other OzSpace talks:

Blythe, Joe, Jeremiah Ngubidirr Tunmuck, Rapahel Wurdanmanthupirr Tunmuck & Jake Miller. 2024. Etic and emic approaches to research on Murrinhpatha spatial language. Australian Languages Workshop 2024, Canberra.

Blythe, Joe. 2024. The primordial centre of everything. Seminar presented at ANU.

Ennever, Tom. 2024. Cardinal direction terms in Kukatja: Their morphosyntax, semantics and domains of use. 11^th European Australianist Workshop, Université Paris-Cite, Fontainebleau, France.

Palmer, Bill. 2024. Egocentric spatial encoding in languages with no left and right. Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2024 conference. University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

Palmer, Bill. 2024. Sociotopography: The interaction of language, environment, culture and cognition. Seminar presented at UWA.

Bill Palmer

Diyari language website

A major new website at www.diyari.org is now available with information and resources for the Diyari language spoken in northern South Australia and western New South Wales. A large part of the more than 24 Mbytes of material published there results from a project (funded by Leverhulme Trust) that Peter K. Austin carried out 2021-2024 to digitise and mark up the 2,180 page English translation of the four volume "Diari-German Dictionary" created by Rev. J.G. Reuther, a German-speaking Lutheran missionary who was in charge of Bethesda mission at Lake Killalpaninna (near Cooper Creek, east of Lake Eyre, South Australia and in Diyari traditional country) from 1888 to 1906. In addition, links to a reference grammar and dictionary of Diyari are provided, along with a blog and podcast about the Diyari language. Everything on the website is open access under a creative commons licence.

For more details see https://elpublishing.org/el-blog.org/ or www.diyari.org/resources/

Peter Austin

Forthcoming Events

Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

The Australian National University, 26 to 29 November 2024. To register, please visit here.

The 13^th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics

The 13^th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL) will take place from 23-27 June 2025 in Canberra, Australia at the Australian National University (ANU).

Danniel Barth

AUSIT National Conference

The AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators Inc.) National Conference 2024 will take place at RMIT University in Melbourne, 21–23 November. The theme of this year’s conference is “Linguistic equity and access: translating and interpreting – connecting our communities and the world”. For more information go to the conference page link on the AUSIT website: AUSIT National Conference 2024. And to get a good idea of what attending an AUSIT conference is like, you can check out this short Youtube clip of highlights from the AUSIT National Conference 2023.

Helen Sturgess

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, Zhengdao Ye 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 Zhengdao an email (zhengdao.ye@anu.edu.au).

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/Membership/JoinMember.

Back to newsletter list