Mamoun Bani Amer, “Lexical Metaphor and Bonds in Australians’ Facebook Discourse: Enacting (Dis)Affiliation Concerning the Voice to Parliament Referendum”
Fahmida Chouldry, “Exploring Disciplinary Affiliation in Academic Book Reviews: A Systemic Functional and Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Rhetorical Structures and Appraisal in Applied Linguistics”
Edith Kirlew, “Identifying Mathematical Expression for Teaching and Learning Mathematics in Kriol”

Projects

CDU Linguistics organised the Top End Languages Forum 2025 (TELF2025), held 3-5 June at the CDU Casuarina Campus. More than 75 delegates from 10+ communities, and representing 30+ First Nations languages, attended the 3-day forum. The forum included guest presentations, breakout sessions and sharing opportunities for language advocates of the Top End to advance their community language aspirations, and provided an opportunity to collaboratively draft the ‘Top End Strong Languages Statement’, which sets out a collective vision for stronger support for bilingual education, community language governance and decision making, and grassroots language initiatives. The statement will be launched in early 2026. TELF2025 was facilitated by Rarrtjiwuy Melanie Herdman, Pirrawayingi Puruntatameri, Jenny Manmurulu and Ian Mongunu Gumbula, and was funded by AIATSIS.

Awni Etaywe continues to work on his project “From Discourse to Violence: Disinformation, Polarised Grievances, and AI and Forensic Linguistics for CVE” [https://www.avert.net.au/impact/successful-applicants-announced-phase-2-of-the-national-cve-research-project]

Publications

A Aquino, I Gumbula, N Bidwell, and S Bird (2024), What’s the weather story? Both-ways learning in Indigenous-led climate communication workshops in northern Australia. Participatory Design Conference 2024, Sibu, Malaysia. https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669886

S Bird (2024), Must NLP be Extractive? Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 14915–14929, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.797

N Curtin, B Pigram, R Wallace and S Bird (to appear), “We are that beacon”: Illuminating Indigenous sovereignty through truth-telling. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology.

Edmonds-Wathen, C., & Wilmoth, S. (2025). Deductive reasoning in a spatial task by Pitjantjatjara speaking children. Proceedings of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 1, 219–226.

Etaywe, A., & Giles, H. (in press). Relational dynamics in violent extremist incitement communication: Language as bonds, obligations, and a catalyst for polarisation. Discourse and Communication.

Etaywe, A. (to appear). CDA/PDA of Jewish activism and co-resistance to disinformation on Palestine: Ethical tenor, positioning, counter-framing, and axiological bonding. Sage Open.

R O’Connor, C Kutay (2025), The Yugambeh digital language story. International Journal of Digital Libraries 26, 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-025-00417-9

T Hlaváčková, S Bird (2025), Teaching food knowledge through a card game. Language Documentation and Conservation 19, 224-247. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74818

B Wiltshire, S Bird, and R Hardwick (2024), Understanding how language revitalisation works: a realist synthesis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45, 3946-3962. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2022.2134877

Presentations

CDU was well-represented at PULiiMA 2025 (25-29 August 2025, Darwin Convention Centre), with the following presentations:

Appleby, Dianne, Glennis Newry, Ian Gumbula, Steven Bird, “Language Parties: Celebrating Kimberley Languages and Language Champions through Storytelling”
Bednall, James, Lisa Bell, Callan Bindon, Gloria Fogarty, Annelise Jansen, Cecelia Kelly, Gary Passmore and Kiara Rahman, “Strengthening Badimia language through on-Country and online language learning”
Bednall, James, Miranda Burarungrot, Darren Flavelle, Jordan Lachler, Kate Paynter, Leonora Rotomane Houma and Kevin Martens Wong, “Comparing Programs and Contexts: How to Improve Skills Training for Intergenerational Language Sustainability”
Gumbula, Ian and Angelina Aquino, “Living with Weather: Communication and Connection and Relationships with Weather”
Gumbula, Ian, Steven Bird, James Bednall, Michaela Spencer, “Investing in Aboriginal Languages”
Mainzinger, Julia, “Can a Language Learner Teach the Language? A Podcast Journey”

New Roles and Recognition

Awni Etaywe has been appointed Assessor for a three-year term with the European Science Foundation College of Experts.

Awni Etaywe was awarded Top Paper Award from the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) at the 18th Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE 2025) for his paper: “Building bonds and reader engagement through positive environmental journalism in Australia: Ideological positioning and affiliation”

Top End Linguistic Circle (TELC)

The next Top End Linguistic Circle seminar will be held 13 November at 2pm, where Howard Amery will discuss "Reckoning with number: Yolŋu languages and 'foreign number'”. For more information, sign up to the TELC mailing list.

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.

Conferences

CDU Linguistics will be hosting the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Conference, 17-19 November 2025. Registrations close 2 November, please check the conference website for further information: http://alaaconference.cdu.edu.au

James Bednall

News from Macquarie University

Phonetics Lab Updates

Journal articles

Gnevsheva, K. & Szakay, A. (2025). L2 speakers are more flexible than L1 speakers in second dialect acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism. 10.1177/13670069251340258

Penney, J., Ratko, L., & Cox, F. (2025). Electroglottographic analysis of coda voicelessness in Australian English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 158(2), 1268–1282. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0038958.

Wedlock, J., Wilson, N. & Szakay, A. (2025). Changing taboos in Australian English: findings from Australian university students. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 10.1080/07268602.2025.2548469

White, H., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2025). Change in the prevalence of creaky voice over time in Australian English. JASA Express Letters, 5(9), 095201. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039080.

Chapters

Cox, F., & Penney, J. (2025). Dynamic characteristics of price and mouth in Multicultural Australian English. In E. R. Thomas (Ed.), Immigrant Englishes Around the World (pp. 40–64). Routledge.

Conference proceedings

Fan, Z., Ibrahim, R. K., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2025). Creaky voice facilitates more efficient phonological processing of Mandarin Tone 3. In O. Scharenborg, C. Oertel, & K. Truong (Eds.), Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2024, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (pp. 1303–1307). https://doi.org: 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1168

White, H., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2025). Variability in intervocalic /t/ and community diversity in Australian English. In O. Scharenborg, C. Oertel, & K. Truong (Eds.), Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (pp. 121–125). https://doi.org: 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-664

Proctor, M., Szalay, T., Piyadasa, T., Jin, C., Sanaei, N., Gully, A., Waddington, D., Foster, S., & Ballard, K. (2025). Rhotic Articulation in Australian English: Insights from MRI. In O. Scharenborg, C. Oertel, & K. Truong (Eds.), Proc. Interspeech 2025, (pp. 3499–3503). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1619

Szalay, T., Proctor, M., Gully, A., Piyadasa, T., Jin, C., Waddington, D., Sanaei, N., Foster, S., & Ballard, K. (2025). Lateral Channel Formation in Australian English /l/: Insights from Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In O. Scharenborg, C. Oertel, & K. Truong (Eds.), Proc. Interspeech 2025, (pp. 3489–3493). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1065

Piyadasa, T., Glaunès, J., Gully, A., Proctor, M., Ballard, K., Szalay, T., Sanaei, N., Foster, S., Waddington, D., & Jin, C.(2025). Constrained LDDMM for Dynamic Vocal Tract Morphing: Integrating Volumetric and Real-Time MRI. In O. Scharenborg, C. Oertel, & K. Truong (Eds.), Proc. Interspeech 2025, (pp. 968–972). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1650

News from Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis Lab

Thesis completions

Pillay, Rona K. 2024. Team collaboration and interaction in the operating theatre: A conversation analytic study. Sydney: Macquarie University PhD dissertation. (Supervised by Scott Barnes and Joe Blythe).
Chen, Xiaoyue. 2025. Exploring manifold asymmetry in interaction-focused intervention for aphasia. Sydney: Macquarie University Master of Research. (Supervised by Scott Barnes and Elisabeth Harrison).

CA Lab members’ presentations at the International Pragmatics Conference

Blythe, Joe: Knowledge states and turn composition in Murrinhpatha conversation. This presentation was awarded the 2025 International Pragmatics Association’s Pragmatics of an Understudied Language Award
Chen, Xiaoyue (Cecilia) & Scott Barnes: Participating in interaction-focused intervention for aphasia: A conversation analytic study
Chen, Jessie, Scott Barnes & Joe Blythe: Beyond turn-taking: Some functions of points during self-initiated repair in Mandarin-speaking interaction
Panico, Daniela: Managing opposition in bilingual family talk
Skinner, Natalie & Scott Barnes: Transitional spaces in special education classrooms: Exploring registering as an action in the co-construction of transitional spaces.
Stirling, Lesley, Rod Gardner, Joe Blythe, Francesco Possemato: The role of posture in turn-holding
Yang, Jingyi: Address and Reference in Mandarin TǔCáo.
Joe Blythe also delivered a pre-conference workshop: Cross-linguistic conversation analysis

Publications

Gardner, Rod, Joe Blythe, Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear & Francesco Possemato. 2025. The making of multi-unit turns: A spring-loaded door. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. (This will be launched at ALS2025)

Other Conferences and Workshops

International Association for World Englishes

Invited Plenary by Emeritus Professor Pam Peters: The Americanization of English in Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries: transnational attraction or global English?"
Adam Smith: Revisiting the Namibian English Lexicon in Online Newspapers
Pam Peters: Cultural Keywords and the Representation of Social Conditions in Indian and Sri Lankan Newspapers
Peter Collins; Robert Fuchs; Xinyue Yao; Adam Smith: Non-Standard Morphosyntactic Variation in English World-Wide: A Corpus-Based Study

ALAPP 2025 (Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice)

As an invited plenary Prof. Peter Roger delivered the 2025 Candlin Lecture: Patterns of collaboration in applied linguistic research: Solving real problems in healthcare practice.

Othe HDR news

Rebecca Cramp was awarded the 2024 CIUTI Prize for the most outstanding Master's thesis from a CIUTI member student for her thesis: “Bismillah ar-rahman ar-raheem” – what did the Sheikh say? Challenges for Auslan-English interpreters rendering code-switching in Arabic-English Islamic source texts.
Sixin Liao received the 2025 European Association for Studies in Screen Translation’s (ESIST) inaugural Outstanding PhD Thesis Award for her 2021 PhD thesis The Impact of Visual and Auditory Information on Subtitle Processing: An Eye Tracking Study
Senne van Hoecke, won third prize in the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Young Scholar award.

Joe Blythe

News from Griffith University

HDR and Hons News

Griffith HDR Stephanie Maskova co-organised a Panel on "Blue Pragmatics: Speaking of the Sea and Planetary Waters" at the 19th International Pragmatics Conference (IPC), held in June 2025 at University of Queensland. Stephanie also presented a paper based on her fieldwork in Greenland: “Ice and interaction: A blue pragmatic study of unpredictability and uncertainty in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)”. She will submitting her PhD thesis in December.

HDR Lisa Petersen is also nearing completion of her PhD thesis "Analysis of phonological variation in Hawai'i Sign Language", supervised by Sam Rarrick, Cliff Goddard, Samantha Siyambalapitiya, and Gerry Docherty.

Isabella Schulz graduated with a Class I Honours and University Medal for Academic Excellence. Her Hons project was titled "Exploring the Translation of Finnish Folkloric Words in Juhani Karila’s ‘Fishing for the Little Pike’: A Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach". She presented her work at the SKY Symposium at Tampere University, Finland, in October.

Honours student Lissara Bergamaschi continued as Gidarjil Linguist-in-residence at Central Queensland Language Centre. Lissara presented a paper at the IPC in June, titled: “Rain”, “thunder”, “lightning”, “clouds”, and “flooding” in Aboriginal Languages of Central Queensland: a semantic analysis of agency as a contribution to the typology of meteorological events.

General

The linguists at Griffith have been busy as Local Organisers for ALS2025, coming up at our Gold Coast campus 2-5 December 2025. The Committee is chaired by Gerry Docherty, with Alena Kazmaly (Griffith ECR) as conference Admin Officer.

Susana Eisenchlas has retired from her formal academic role, but remains actively engaged in research through her Adjunct position.

Publications

Goddard, Cliff, Helen Bromhead, Ida Stevia Diget, and Alena Kazmaly. 2025. How to ask a clearer question (or, What questionnaires, scales and surveys stand to gain from a minimal language approach). In L. Sadow, K. Mullan, and C. Goddard (eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.

Peeters, Bert, Lauren Sadow, Cliff GODDARD and Kerry Mullan. 2025. Language, culture, and values: Six ways to see them more clearly. In L. Sadow, K. Mullan, and C. Goddard (eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics. Palgrave Macmillan.

Mullan, Kerry, Lauren Sadow, Cliff GODDARD. 2025. An invitation to Applied Ethnolinguistics. In L. Sadow, K. Mullan, and C. Goddard (eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics. Palgrave Macmillan.

Peeters, Bert, Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan and Cliff GODDARD. 2025. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Underlying Philosophy and Basic Principles. In L. Sadow, K. Mullan, and C. Goddard (eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics, Palgrave Macmillan.

Sadow, Lauren, Kerry Mullan and Cliff GODDARD (eds.). 2025. Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schalley, A. C., & EISENCHLAS, S. A. (2025). Home languages are everyone’s business. In M. Turner & B. Green (Eds.), Multilingualism as opportunity: An integrated perspective on English and languages education in Australia (pp. 60–75). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003479734-6

Thomas, Damon P., Jack Walton, Ken Tann, Kelly SHOECRAFT, Nathan Lowien & Andrew Scott. 2025. Figurative language and narrative writing: insights from high-achieving primary school students. The Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-025-00890-w

Grants

Academic co-leads Sam Rarrick, Adele Pavlidis, Barb Pini, and Inez Fainga'a-Manu Sione have secured funding to deliver the Australia Awards Papua New Guinea (AAPNG) GEDSI Short Courses through June 2027. Valued at $1.18M, this multi-year initiative will support PNG’s development goals through inclusive education, knowledge exchange, and institutional capacity building, strengthening people-to-people ties between PNG and Australia.

Conference

Bromhead, Helen and Cliff Goddard co-organised a Panel at 19th International Pragmatics Conference, titled “Choosing the best words for clear assessable communication”. U. Queensland, 26 June 2025.
Bromhead, Helen 2025. Making disaster messaging clear and accessible using minimal languages. 19th International Pragmatics Conference, U. Queensland, 26 June 2025.
Diget, Ida Stevia and Alena KAZMALY. 2025. Medical Interpreting and Mental Health Screenings: Rewording the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS). 19th International Pragmatics Conference, 23 June 2025.
Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye. 2025. When criteria compete: conceptual basis for decision-making and crosslinguistic examples. 19th International Pragmatics Conference, U. Queensland, 26 June 2025.
Goddard, Cliff. 2025. The Semantic Architecture of the Lexicon (NSM approach). Plenary address at International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Lexical Studies (CIETAL 2025), held in May at University Complutense, Madrid, Spain.
Jain, R., Schalley, A.C., EISENCHLAS, S.A., Qi, G. & Iyer, A. Intergenerational Language Choices in Singapore: Ideologies, Practices, and Transmission. Presented at the 2025 British Association of South Asian Studies Conference. Sept 10, 2025.
Kazmaly, Alena and Ida Stevia Diget. 2025. Complex concepts in everyday words' clothing: term negotiation in psychology and health. 19th International Pragmatics Conference, U. Queensland, 26 June 2025.
Schulz, Isabella. 2025. Conceptualisations of the ‘Näkki’: Translation of a Dangerous Finnish Water Spirit into English. 19th International Pragmatics Conference, U. Queensland, 27 June 2025.

Engagement

As part of ongoing collaboration with Gidarjil Central Queensland Language Centre, Sam Rarrick and Lissara Bergamaschi (BA Honours, Gidarjil Linguist-in-residence) took part in the 1770 Cultural Festival on October 4-5.

Karen Stollznow wrote an article for The Conversation [https://theconversation.com/bitch-has-a-1-000-year-history-its-use-has-always-been-about-power-264479]. Her 2024 book Bitch: The Journey of a Word (CUP) is now available as an Audiobook, narrated by Karen herself. She also contributed a series of articles for Cambridge Core blog [https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/author/karen-stollznow]

Cliff Goddard

News from the University of New South Wales

HDR completions/milestones

Mediating Family Language Policy in the Digital Space: A Case Study of Arabic-Speaking Families in Australia, Nadine Alwadai, successful PhD confirmation. Dr. Seong-Chul Shin, Principal Supervisor, A/Prof Aniko Hatoss: Co-supervisor.

Student conference presentations

Wang, Zhefei. 2025. Monolingual Exchanges in Bilingual Hearings: Transparency and Fairness in Migration Review Hearings. Accepted as oral presentation at the15th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB15). San Sebastian, Spain.

Wang, Zhefei. 2025. Exploratory sequential mixed-methods design integrating case law review, observation, interviews and questionnaires: A case study of interpreting in migration and refugee review hearings in Australia. Presented at European Society of Translation (EST) 2025 Congress. Leeds, UK.

Hakiki, Muhammad Aminullah. 2025. Exploring English teachers’ views on translanguaging opportunities in university classrooms in Indonesia. The 71st TEFLIN (The Association for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia) International Conference, 8-10 October, 2025 at Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia.

Student publications

Alzubaidi M; Hatoss A. 2025. 'What Can Taboo Words Tell Us About Language Choices? Saudi Females’ Attitudes towards Taboo Words in English and Arabic', International Journal of Arabic English Studies, 25, pp. 401 - 420, http://dx.doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v25i2.870

Wang, H., & Loughland, T. (2025). Exploring discursive patterns in post-lesson mentoring conversations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 159, 104994. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2025.104994

Positions and promotions

We welcomed Sithembinkosi Dube to a 3-year education focused position in July.

Clair Hill has been promoted to Level C Senior Lecturer, and in September has commenced a DECRA Fellowship on a project Language for Country: Perceiving and interacting with Cape York landscape.

Events

A small Australian Languages Workshop was held on the 1st of August. This was organised around visiting guest and UNSW alumnus Josh Phillips (Stanford) presenting The Djambarrpuyŋu verbal paradigm: morphosemantics of tense & reality, and also featured presentations by Josh Dahmen (ANU) on Jaru conversation and Dimitri Karadarevic on Dharawal language revitalisation (UNSW).

Conference Presentations

Hatoss, A. 2025. Challenges and innovations in (heritage) language pedagogy in the digital era: Learning languages deeply and the multilingual turn, Keynote address delivered at the NSW Federation of Community Language Schools Annual Community Language Teachers’ Conference, 26 April 2025, University of Sydney.

Hatoss, A. 2025. Multimodal methods in the study of migrant experience and language practice in the urban landscape of Sydney. Paper presented at the 5th International conference of the Sociolinguistics of Migration, 16-17 June, 2025, Sestri Levante, Italy.

Hatoss, A. 2025. Towards an emotive-relational model of family language policy: Bilingual parenting and wellbeing in Hungarian families in Australia. Paper presented at ISB15 conference, San Sebastian, Spain, 9-13 June 2025.

Publications

Aarons, Debra and Mark Mierowsky (2025). Jewish American Stand-up Comedy. In Double, Oliver (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Stand-up Comedy. pp158-174. CUP https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009000635

Hatoss A, 2025, 'Minecraft, the King and Snow White: learning a heritage language through online game play', International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 28, pp. 980 - 995, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2025.2528144

Verstraete, J. C., Bundgaard-Nielsen, R., Baker, B., & Hill, C. (2025). Medial consonant lengthening in Eastern Middle Paman: Syllable position or lexical stress? Australian Journal of Linguistics, 45(2), 115–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2025.2467030

Sanjani MI; Gusdian R; Inayati N; Hatoss A, 2025, 'Conceptualising a continuum of plurilingual family language policy: a systematic literature review', Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, ahead-of-print, pp. 1 - 17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2025.2504121

Stern L; Hale S; Schwartz M; Doherty S, 2025, 'Protecting the defendant’s rights in interpreted cases: How does public policy shape ‘good practice’ for judicial officers working with interpreters?', Journal of Judicial Administration, 34, pp. 111-129.

Stern L, 2025, 'Interpreters and Translators', in Blewitt G; Aarons M (ed.), Nazis in Australia. The Special Investigations Unit, 1987-1994, Schwartz Books, pp. 225-241. https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/nazis-australia

Clair Hill

News from the University of Western Australia

Honorary Doctorate

On Friday 25 July 2025, Glenys Dale Collard was conferred an Honorary Doctorate of the University (Linguistics) for her lifelong commitment to Aboriginal education and Aboriginal English.

As an Adjunct Research Fellow at UWA and a core Language Lab member, Glenys has spent decades working with and for her people — shaping policy, improving educational outcomes, and championing diversity. From her early work with Elders on Nyungar Our Way to her co-leadership of the ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning project (with Patricia Konigsberg), Glenys has transformed how language and cultural knowledge are understood and talked about.

Her voice has most recently carried into the education sector through her work with Oxford University Press and the health sector through collaboration with the Heart Foundation, and into the tech world through a groundbreaking partnership with Google to make voice-operated AI technology more inclusive for Aboriginal English speakers.

Image of Glenys Dale Collard Image of Glenys Dale Collard receiving doctorate

Induction to WA Women’s Hall of Fame

Glenys Collard was inducted to the 2025 WA Women’s Hall of Fame for her work on Aboriginal English. Bravo, Glenys, for being such a tireless advocate for your Country and your people.

University of Oxford visiting fellowship

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has been awarded a highly competitive research fellowship (14% success rate) to spend time at All Souls College, University of Oxford between early January and mid-March 2026. https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2025/august/lawyer-and-linguist-awarded-prestigious-fellowships

Academic promotion

Congratulations to Dr Jess Kruk who has been promoted to Level C Senior Lecturer. Bravo, Jess!

Cosmos Institute Seminar Series

Celeste Rodríguez Louro was admitted to Oxford’s 2025 Cosmos Institute and Laboratory for Human-Centred AI (HAI Lab) seminar series where she completed an 8-week-long seminar series on Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy between April and June 2025 (5% success rate).

New book

Congratulations to Jess Kruk whose new book, titled Kalimantan’s Ethnic Chinese Youth, is now open for pre-order through Springer’s website: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-93432-2

New role

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has taken up the position of Deputy Chair of UWA’s Generative AI Think Tank. Further information is available here: https://www.uwa.edu.au/about/leadership-and-governance/strategy-and-values/artificial-intelligence

New partnership

In her role as Deputy Chair of the GenAI Think Tank, Celeste Rodríguez Louro is leading an exciting partnership with Oxford’s Machine Learning and AI Competency Centre. An online launch event is planned for Thursday 4 December. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxforduwa-genai-in-academia-series-launch-seminar-tickets-1707492318489

PhD student updates

PhD candidate Madeleine Clews’ thesis ‘our own familiar English’: A historical sociolinguistic study of the shaping of Australian English through the lens of Western Australia was passed without revisions at her viva voce examination in July. The completion of her PhD was certified by UWA at the end of August. This was during a busy conference travel program that saw her giving presentations on her findings at HiSoN in Bristol, UK in May, NWAV-AP in August and ISLE8 at Santiago de Compostela, Spain in September. Madeleine is now settling into a new role as Language Lab’s Adjunct Research Fellow and has a busy program of fieldwork planned as part of her main post-doctoral project to curate a large corpus of 19th-century ego-documents ‘from below’ to place the analysis of AusE and emergent Aboriginal English firmly on the landscape of Early Modern Englishes.

PhD student Lucía Fraiese was awarded a UWA Sue Baker Convocation Award and a Graduate Women WA Child Development Scholarship to support a short-term research visit to the UK in September 2025. During this visit, Lucía visited Professor Emma Moore (University of Sheffield), Professor Julia Snell (University of Leeds) and met with both Miriam Meyerhoff (All Souls College, Oxford) and Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto) at Oxford. While in the UK, Lucia also presented at UK Language Variation and Change 15 (Lancaster University) and the British Association of Applied Linguistics 58th conference (University of Glasgow), for which she received a travel bursary to present in the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion BAAL Executive Colloquium organised by Zhu Hua (UCL) and Peter Browning (UCL). Lucía has also won the UWA 3-minute thesis competition. She has also recently had a sole-authored paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and a co-authored paper in Journal of Sociolinguistics.

PhD candidate Katharina Froedrich visited Karratha and surrounding areas in the Pilbara region, northern WA, for four fieldwork and internship trips between March and October 2025. She completed her data collection for this year as well as a research internship with PKKP Aboriginal Corporation in September 2025. During one of her trips to the Pilbara, she was invited to do a radio interview about her PhD project by Ngaarda Media in Ieramugadu (Roebourne). Listen here: https://www.ngaardamedia.com.au/news/uwa-researcher-documents-how-mob-use-english-in-the-pilbara. She was also invited to attend the 10-year anniversary of PKKP's Native Title Determination celebration during her last fieldwork trip. Katharina has also collaborated with UWA colleagues in Decolonizing the introductory linguistics curriculum an article in the Australian Journal of Linguistics. Katharina is now preparing for a research visit in Germany and the UK in early 2026.

PhD Candidate Alex Stephenson has completed his Grounded Theory analysis of interviews recorded across 3 West Australian language centres in 2024/2025. He completed the Language Data Commons of Australia Graduate Digital Research Fellowship program in June and continues to work with his program mentor, Ben Foley, to develop a handbook to post-digitisation exploring the practical and technical side to managing digital data in a language centre setting.

Staff updates

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway and Luisa Miceli have again shared the teaching of one of our first-year units, LING1002: Language, Mind, and Brain. Amanda also continues working remotely with PKKP, the native title body corporate for the Pinikura and Puutu Kunti Kurrama people, whose traditional Country is in the Pilbara region of northern WA. Amanda will also continue in 2026 as the WA state chair and problems co-coordinator for the OzCLO high school Linguistics Olympiad.

New Language Lab members

Language Lab has grown from fewer than 10 members initially to a current 23. See what we’ve been up to here: https://www.uwa.edu.au/schools/research/the-language-lab

Visit to UWA Linguistics

Maïa Ponsonnet will be in Western Australia from December 1, 2025 until early February 2026. During her visit she will meet collaborators and make progress on several projects. She is also hoping to visit the Northern Territory in early February.

Publications

Bowern, C., Llamas, B., Miceli, Luisa., Tobler, R., & Veth, P. (2025). Australian Archaeolinguistics. In M. Robbeets, & M. Hudson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language (pp. 518-539). Oxford University Press.

Ponsonnet, Maïa. 2025. The semantic typology of expressive interjections: colexifications in pain, disgust and joy interjections across languages. Lingua 324(103979). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103979

Ponsonnet, Maïa. 2025. Individual preferences when using placeholders: The case of Dalabon (Australian, Gunwinyguan). In Pakendorf B. & Rose F. ed., Fillers: Hesitatives and placeholders, 315-340. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. 2025. Generative AI is not ‘a calculator for words’. Five reasons why this idea is misleading. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-is-not-a-calculator-for-words-5-reasons-why-this-idea-is-misleading-263323

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste, Katharine Parton and Lauren Gawne. 2025. For the love of people: Remembering our supervisor Barbara Frances Kelly. Australian Journal of Linguistics 45 (3).

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste, Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway, Ewan O’Brien, Katharina Froedrich and Luisa Miceli. 2025. Decolonizing the introductory linguistics curriculum. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 45 (3).

Hutchinson, Ben, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Collard and Ned Cooper. (2025). Designing speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, risks and participation. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM FAccT ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Athens, Greece. 108–124. https://facctconference.org/static/docs/facct2025-206archivalpdfs/facct2025-final59-acmpaginated.pdf

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. (2025). AI systems are built on English – but not the kind most of the world speaks. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ai-systems-are-built-on-english-but-not-the-kind-most-of-the-world-speaks-249710

Grants

Foyer and Garla: Using language to re-centre Indigenous perspectives in Archaeology, (Luisa Miceli, Maïa Ponsonnet and Emilie Dotte-Sarout). 2025 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and France Initiative Grant, Embassy of France in Australia, $8,800.

Talking our story: Aboriginal English storytelling for inclusive AI design (Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard). 2025 Australian Linguistic Society Research Awards. $5,000.

Awards

Congratulations to Celeste Rodríguez Louro who received a 2025 Outreach Prize by the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) for outstanding outreach initiatives that successfully promote public awareness of English Linguistics. Celeste was praised for her ‘creative, pro-active, and impactful engagement with diverse audiences beyond academia’. You can read Celeste’s winning application here: https://www.isle-linguistics.org/assets/content/ISLEprizes/2025outreach-rodriguez-louro.pdf.

Linguistics internships

Luisa Miceli has continued to lead the Linguistics Work Integrated Learning program. Two students completed a placement at Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre in Geraldton during the winter break. They compiled an impressive 80-page first draft of a Nhanda learner guide. One of these students has since secured a Linguist position at the Buurabalayji Thalanyji Aboriginal Corporation demonstrating once again how valuable the experience gained through the WIL program is for our graduates.

Two students have been undertaking a semester long placement at the Berndt Museum. They have been working on archivally describing language collections and preparing these materials for access requests submitted by community members.

One student has undertaken a placement working on the Strelley Literature Production Centre Collection available on the UWA Library’s online platform, UWA Collected. This collection includes over 300 books, primarily in Nyangumarta language. The student has been enriching the collection by curating metadata and translations.

Community-led Honours projects

Two Honours students supervised by Luisa Miceli have started working on research projects proposed by Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre and language communities they represent, that support language documentation and revitalisation goals.

Invited keynotes and talks

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. ‘The Yarning Corpus: Aboriginal English in Southwest WA’. Sydney Corpus Lab, University of Sydney, October 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. ‘Change the tech, not the speaker: Aboriginal English and Indigenous futures’.
Department of Linguistics, Monash University, October 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. ‘Aboriginal English Voices: Improving speech technologies for Indigenous users’. Science Catalyst Event, Google Sydney, 19 September 2025, (with Glenys Collard and Ben Hutchinson).
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘The effective use of AI in research and studies’, UWA’s Oceans Institute, Perth, Australia, 17 September 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘Outreach with impact: Linguistics in the public sphere’. Invited presentation at 2025 ISLE Conference, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1-4 September 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘Linguistics in action: Making voice-operated tech more inclusive’. Invited keynote presentation at AI in Action: From theory to practice, University Club of WA, Perth, Australia, 13 June 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘AI has a language problem’ invited panel provocation at the AI Policy Taboos series, UWA Policy Institute and Forrest Research Foundation evening series, Forrest Foundation, Perth, Australia, 11 June 2025. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq7LLrwM2WQ
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘Know Thyself: Remaining critical in the age of AI’. Invited guest lecture, AI Club and Philosophy, Politics and Economic Union, Reid Library, UWA, 19 May 2025.
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste . ‘The AI landscape: Navigating changes in work, education, and society’. Invited panel presentation at the Autumn General Meeting of UWA’s Convocation, UWA, Perth, Australia, 20 March 2025. Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/event/4796698/ec92ac257b

Selected conference presentations

Fraiese, Lucía, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Matt Hunt Gardner and Glenys Collard “We was goin’ kangaroo shooting: Was/were variation in Australian Aboriginal English”. United Kingdom Language Variation and Change 15, Lancaster University, United Kingdom, 2-4 September 2025.

Fraiese, Lucía “She is not white, she is Latina”: Positionality as an asset in cross-cultural ethnographic research with First Nations youth in Australia. [Invited Paper Presentation as part of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion executive colloquium]. British Association of Applied Linguistics 58, University of Glasglow, 4-6 September 2025.

Collard, Glenys Dale, Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Ben Hutchinson. “Aboriginal English speakers' experiences with language technologies”. PULiiMA 2025. Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. 25-29 August 2025.

Hutchinson, Ben, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Collard and Ned Cooper. “Designing speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, risks and participation”. ACM FAccT ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Athens, Greece, 23-26 June 2025.

Hutchinson, Ben, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Collard and Ned Cooper. “Speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English”. NAACL 2025 Workshop C3NLP 2025. Non-archival submission. Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. May, 4 2025.

Parncutt, Amy, Kelly, Breanna, Daulbin-Satrick, Chanice, Hamilton-Hollaway, Amanda, & Stewart, Kristy. (2025, August 27). Training for the long term: A guide to onboarding and upskilling language workers [Conference presentation]. PULiiMA Indigenous Language and Technology Conference, Darwin, N.T.

Workshop organisation

Language Variation and Change, Australia 6 (co-organisers: Catherine Travis [ANU], Celeste Rodríguez Louro [UWA], James Walker [Melbourne], Matthew Callaghan [Griffith]). Organised session at the 2025 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, 3-5 December 2025.

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 Whadjuk Nyungar Country next year.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

News from RMIT

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

HDRs

Brunetti, Edoardo. (2025). Review of Le Cam Jean-Luc and Le Pipec Erwan (eds), L’école et les langues dans les espaces en situation de partage linguistique. (Histoire) Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024, 385 pp. 978 2 7535 9503 3. Journal of French Language Studies. 2025 (35). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269525000043

Zhao, Zichen. (2024). The Reconstruction of Female Images in the English Translations of Shui Hu Zhuan. Comparative Literature: East & West, 8(2), 234–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2024.2436155

Zhao, Zichen. (2025). Rewriting Chinese Women through Western Eyes: A Postcolonial-Feminist Re-reading of Pearl S. Buck’s All Men Are Brothers. Journal of Intercultural Communication 25 (3). https://doi.org/10.36923/jicc.v25i3.1168

Staff

Ducasse, Ana Maria. (2025). The language of No: Analysing failure to attract funding in entrepreneurial TV-pitches. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 11, 101546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.101546

Mullan, Kerry. (2025). Review of Villy Tsakona. 2024. Exploring the Sociopragmatics of Online Humor. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Journal of Pragmatics 240, 138-141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.03.002

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Fukuno, Maho. Whose ‘best words’?: Perceptions of ‘good’ translation by community readers. 19th International Pragmatics Assocaition (IPrA), University of Queensland, June.

Mullan, Kerry (in absentia, with Diane de Saint Léger, University of Melbourne). La pratique du tutoiement à Tahiti: quels enjeux ? pour qui ? (‘Using tu in Tahiti: challenges and practices’.) 28th Association of French Language Studies conference, UC Louvain & Unviversité d’Anvers, Brussels, July.

Mullan, Kerry (with Diane de Saint Léger, University of Melbourne, in absentia). T’es qui toi? T and V forms in contemporary spoken Tahitian French. 19th International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference, University of Queensland, June.

HDR COMPLETIONS / MILESTONES

The following students successfully passed their progress milestones in June 2025:

Alanazi, Abair. Thesis title: Conceptualizations of Love in Saudi Arabic. Supervisors: Kerry Mullan and Ana Maria Ducasse. Confirmation of Candidature

Lehartel, Temiti. Thesis title: Rethinking “Remoteness” in the Fiction of Alexis Wright and Cathie Dunsford [Cotutelle RMIT - University Paul Valéry Montpellier III].Supervisors: Kerry Mullan, Yaso Nadarjah (RMIT) and Claire Omhovère (UPVM). Second milestone

Vu, Tung. Thesis title: Australia-Based International Students' Perception of Intercultural Competence for Workplace Settings. Supervisors: Kerry Mullan and Naomi Wilks-Smith. Second milestone

Zhao, Zichen. Thesis title: Female Images in the English Translations of Shui Hu Zhuan.Supervisors: Jing Qi, Jindan Ni and Kerry Mullan. Third milestone

NEW PROJECTS

Mullan, Kerry (with Diane de Saint Léger, University of Melbourne). Address pronouns in Tahitian French: investigation and analysis of current practices. Funding received from ASSA (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia), March.

Kerry Mullan

News from La Trobe University

Recently Completed Thesis: The Use of Emoji in Jordanian Discourse: A Culturally Specific Approach to CMC

Dr Mohanad Al-azzam was recently awarded a PhD for his work on the use of emoji in Jordanian Arabic. This research project drew on a diverse range of methods to give a nuanced understanding of how emoji are being used in online communication in Jordan. Dr Al-azzam was supervised by Dr Lauren Gawne with a committee including Professor Tonya Stebbins, Dr. Laura Tolton, and Professor James Walker.

This thesis examines how Jordanian users of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) employ emoji in online communication, focusing on the social and linguistic practices involved. A mixed research methodology was utilised to provide a comprehensive analysis, incorporating both quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative data analysis. Public data from Facebook and X, as well as private data from a WhatsApp family group, were analysed. Additionally, a survey explored participants’ understandings and usage of emoji as both senders and receivers.

This thesis demonstrates that Jordanians utilise emoji to structure interactions, articulate cultural identities, and communicate ideological perspectives. Cross-cultural variation in emoji interpretation is evident, shaped by online usage norms. Emoji usage patterns remain consistent across both private and public interactions, with no significant gender differences in frequency or variety, attributed to multifaceted factors.

Launch of the Language & Ethical Technology Lab

The Linguistics program at La Trobe is delighted to announce the foundation of The Language & Ethical Technology Lab. The Language & Ethical Technology Lab is a research network for people who want to evaluate generative AI systems, understand better how AI systems work, develop ethical AI and data use cases & prototypes, and imagine alternative ways to flourish with technology.

The lab is being led by Dr Judith Bishop and Dr Lauren Gawne. A launch event was held on the 10th of October, with two curated symposia, the first focused on Ethical AI, Virtual Reality, Social Robots and Data and the second on Ethical AI, Creativity and Language. If you would like to know more about the lab or discuss possible points of collaboration, please contact Judith or Lauren.

Recent work

Dr Gerald Roche (Linguistics) led a submission from La Trobe University to the Australian Government’s Department of Education Anti-Bullying Rapid Review. Coordinated by La Trobe University’s Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre (OTARC), the submission brings together La Trobe experts across linguistics, education, and psychology. The team extensively reviewed the literature, including dozens of published academic articles and reports from both government and non-government agencies, resulting in 14 recommendations. You can read more, including the full submission, on the OTARC website: https://otarc.blogs.latrobe.edu.au/at-school-and-in-danger-why-we-need-to-end-the-bullying-of-autistic-students-and-how-we-can-do-it/

Gerald also recently published an article as part of a special issue of the journal Genocide Studies International on "The Erasure and Revitalization of Indigenous Cultures and Languages" (https://utppublishing.com/toc/gsi/16/2). The six articles in the issue explore the role that the suppression of Indigenous languages plays within genocide, and how language revitalization can support post-genocidal healing and justice. Gerald's contribution to the special issue, "‘Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language’: Language Revitalization, Reactionary Settler Colonialism, and Perpetual Genocide" looks at the backlash against Indigenous language revitalization in Australia as part of ongoing genocidal dynamics.

Lauren Gawne

University of Melbourne

Updates from the word-order project

Edmonds-Wathen, C., & Wilmoth, S. (2025). Deductive reasoning in a spatial task by Pitjantjatjara speaking children. Proceedings of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 1, 219–226.

Kidd, E., Garrido Rodríguez, G., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Guillén, J. E., & Nordlinger, R. (2025). How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia). Cognitive Science, 49(7), e70087. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087

We farewelled Shanthi Kumarage, who finished up her role as Postdoctoral Fellow.

African Studies Group - Symposium 2025

Theme: “African Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Ways of Knowing – A Conversation of Traditions, Modernity, and the Future”

Date: Wednesday, 29th October 2025

Venue: Carrillo Ganther Theatre, Sydney Myer Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus.

Eventbrite: ASG Symposium 2025

We warmly invite students and academics across disciplines to submit proposals, including ongoing research, theses, and unfinished papers. More info at Eventbrite link above.

Bulukia Abdullah, ASG President.

Two opinion pieces by Nick Thieberger

Thieberger, Nick. 2025. Records of Pacific Languages: Where Are They and Who Can See Them? Department of Pacific Affairs In Brief series. Canberra, ACT: Dept. of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733771963

Thieberger, Nick. 2025. The tip of the iceberg: Public good and the curation of humanities research records. Arena Online.

The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence

We now have our transcription platform SoundScribe up and running. This is optimised for collecting and analysing transcripts of English or LOTE audio that is difficult to understand, whether due to audio factors (poor quality recording) or listener factors (unfamiliar variety). Designed to help with forensic transcription and translation but has many other potential uses. Please come to our demo at ALS (currently scheduled for Wed lunchtime) or contact us for further info. Special credit to James Uy Thinh Quang and Eleanor Kettle for great work on this project.https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/language-forensics

Helen Fraser

News from the University of Technology Sydney

The book Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity, and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners by Zozan Balci (Routledge, 2025) was launched on October 1st at Darling Square Library supported by the City of Sydney; the podcast interview on Language on the Move discussing the book is available here.

New, open access research:

Grey, A. (2025) 'Celebrating Indigenous linguistic diversity in Australia’s parliaments'. Australian Journal of Linguistics 45(2). 1-39.

Grey, A. (2025) ‘Making linguistic diversity visible in parliament’. Language on the Move (1 July 2025).

Grey, A. (2025) ‘The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights’ [Review essay]. Sociolinguistic Studies, issue 19.1. 153-166.

Student focus:

A profile featuring HDRs and ECRS in the Law and Language Interdisciplinary Research Network (LLIRN): ‘Who’s new in law and language?’ Language on the Move (30 July 2025).

And a blog by undergraduate scholar and LLIRN Intern, Allegra Holmes à Court: How judges think about language

Alexandra Grey

News from the Australian National University (ANU)

Award

Congratulations to Nick Evans who has just been awarded the 2025 Neil and Saras Smith Medal for lifetime achievement in the field of linguistics. Previous winners have included Noam Chomsky, William Labov, Marianne Mithun, John Lyons, Barbara Hall Partee and Bernard Comrie. Nick is the first person from outside Europe and North America to receive this honour. For more information and to read Nick's reaction to the award, see

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medals/neil-saras-smith-medal-linguistics/

Stories from Research Students

From Kira Davey: During July and August, I spent 6 weeks in the Iyaq Nam speaking village of Boem in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. The village was already abuzz with excitement for the upcoming 50th Independence Day celebrations on the 16th of September. Music filled the evenings with the rhythmic pounding of asuq and the rattling of gilingalang, as chiefs and community leaders led girls in grass gabaar and boys in cloth beem in spirals around the village’s central meeting place. In preparation for the approaching celebrations, students attending local Talidig School had been instructed to learn traditional songs and dances for a performance that would contribute to their Arts grade. Each of fifteen different community units represented by students at the school prepared their own performance, resulting in a line-up reflective of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the area. For many students from Boem and its surrounds, this marked their first time learning ancestral songs in the Iyaq Nam language, which has seen a slowing of intergenerational transmission in recent decades. The timing of this new initiative at Talidig School felt significant, as we began developing children's story books in Iyaq Nam thanks to funding from the ALS Laves Scholarship. It was an energising time to launch the project, alongside ongoing efforts to strengthen and sustain Iyaq Nam language and culture.

Iyaq Nam is a Trans-New-Guinea language of the Hanseman family. This trip was part of my PhD fieldwork, for which I am writing a grammar of Iyaq Nam in areal-typological context. The language team is made up of Maion Yasum, Felix Baleng, Malom Ila, Mailong Luak and myself.

Traditional drum Two men in a recording workshop

Left: Asuq - traditional drum. Right: Felix Baleng and Malom Ila in a recording workshop, July 2025.

Tais village community preparation From Elliott Gore: My PhD project is to document and describe Namo, a Yam language spoken in two villages in Western Province, Papua New Guinea; Tais and Mari. As these villages lie on the southern coast of PNG, they share cultural and historical connections with other Torres Strait communities, particularly Boigu Island. I recently completed my first fieldtrip to Tais and discovered that the people there consider their language different from that spoken in Mari, contrary to the (admittedly limited) published literature. More fieldwork, including collecting data from Mari village is required to determine how different these two varieties are. There are also people living in Tais who speak Len, a related language now spoken by fewer than 10 people. I was very happy to be able to record some of this language, as well as Ná (pronounced /næ/) the more widely spoken language in Tais. I am grateful to receive funding for this project from the AGRTP, and from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, School of Culture, History, and Language HDR fieldwork fund.

Photo: Tais village community preparing for a traditional welcome of myself and Nick Evans.

Cultural dress exchange From George Lindsay: My PhD project is a descriptive grammar of Kimaghima (also known as Kimaghama), a Kolopom (Trans-New Guinea) language spoken on Kolopom Island in South Papua Province, Indonesia. I have just embarked on my second fieldtrip, dividing time between Kolopom Island and Merauke, the provincial capital and home to a large number of Kimaghima speakers. During my first fieldtrip, I focused on the central variety spoken in Kimaam village, the subject of limited prior documentation — mainly wordlists and brief overviews by Dutch missionaries. This time, I am shifting focus to the northern variety as spoken in the two neighbouring villages of Teri and Sabudom.

Though only 15km apart, Kimaam and Teri-Sabudom present two starkly different language ecologies. Kimaam, the district capital, is the main services hub for the island and has a diverse population, including many Indonesian transmigrants. Here, Kimaghima is used only actively by older speakers for in-group communication, while younger generations use Indonesian or Papuan Malay. In contrast, Kimaghima remains vital across all age groups in Teri and Sabudom, where government services are minimal and road access is often cut off during the wet season.

This fieldtrip is supported by a grant from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research. The funding will be used to produce video records of agricultural practices and lifecycle events to serve as linguistic stimuli and an enduring record of cultural life on Kolopom Island at a time of rapid development and change. I am also collaborating with Reinardus Kobarema, a Kimaghima speaker and Information Systems student at Musamus University, to develop a trilingual Kimaghima–Indonesian–English dictionary app.

Photo: An exchange of cultural dress. Bapak Hilarius Na tries on my akubra (Australian hat) while I try on Hilarius' merinda (Kimaghima ornamental chestbands) in Kampung Kimaam.

Lunch with Sumario and the Tatubeket family From Emma Keith: My PhD project aims to write a grammar of Sipora Mentawai, a Mentawai language spoken on Sipora island. I recently finished a five-month stint living in Tua Pejat, the largest township in Sipora and conducting fieldwork with speakers of Sipora Mentawai. This trip was conducted in collaboration with Sumario Tatubeket, an L1 Sipora Mentawai speaker, who assisted in the collection of a growing corpus of video materials documenting dialogues and monologues relating to traditional and modern life in Sipora. He has continued this work even as I have returned to Australia.

The several months I spent in Sipora were split between expeditions to villages (Beriulou and Taraet) with Sumario, where we collected videos; time spent in Tua Pejat, when I would do elicitation with local contacts in the town and Sumario would often do his own video collection in other villages (Masokut, Bosua, Katiet, and others); and several journeys I made to Padang, where I did elicitation with members of the FORMMA (Mentawai Students' Forum) in order to learn more about the internal diversity of the Mentawai languages. I also made short trips to Padang and Maileppet in order to track down copies of difficult-to-find dictionaries of Rereiket Mentawai and Simalegi Mentawai, which have been invaluable in diachronic research on the genealogy and internal divergence of the Mentawai languages, which remains ongoing upon my return to Australia.

I will continue to process the now-large corpus of video materials in Sipora Mentawai as my grammar-writing progresses. Sumario remains in Sipora and continues to collect videos from his village, Beriulou, which will slowly be added to this corpus. A portion of this corpus with interlinear glossing and translation into Indonesian and English will be uploaded to PARADISEC later in the progress of my PhD. The project is part of the ARC-funded project Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, Typology and History.

Photo: Lunch with Sumario and the Tatubeket family in Beriulou (Photo: Sumario Tatubeket)

Awards and Grants

Danielle Barth - Firebird Foundation for Oral Literature Collection: Laura W.R. Appell and George N. Appell Research Grant “Engaged Documentation of Matukar Oral Literature and Heritage”: $40,000 USD

Carmel O’Shannessy and Denise Angelo. ANU Watervale Award from ANU First Nations Portfolio. $20,000

Charbel El-Khaissi, recent PhD graduate, has been awarded a 2025 Humanities Travelling Fellowship by the Australian Academy of Humanities.

Darja Hoenigman has been awarded an Australian Academy of the Humanities publication subsidy for her book Talk Goes Many Ways.

Francesco De Toni, research fellow at ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH), awarded a small Strategic Research grant by ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics in September 2025.

George Lindsay, second-year PhD student, has been awarded AUD $10,880 from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research. “Kampung, kebun, kegiatan: Recording the oral literature, ecological knowledge, and cultural life of Kimaghima language speakers”.

Publications

Barth, D. & Davey, K. (2025). Gestures for me and you: a corpus study of Matukar Panau referential gestures. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 1-25.

Passmore, S., San Roque, L., K. Gillespie, Nath, S., Mullan, K., Davey, K., Cawley, T., Biggs, J., Billington, R., Evans, B., Thieberger, N., Evans, N. & Barth, D. (2025). English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced-alignment of two English-Based Pacific Creoles. Proceedings The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31172-31183, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Kidd, E., Hellwig, B., Garcia, R., Defina, R., Davidson, L., & Allen, S. (2025). A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures based on data from the Acquisition Sketch Project. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 45(3/4).

Kidd, E., Garrido Rodriguez, G., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Guillén, J., & Nordlinger, R. (2025). How does speaking a free word order language influence sentence planning and production? Evidence from Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia). Cognitive Science, 49. e70087.

Kidd, E., & Garcia, R. (2025). On convenience, diversity, and generalisability: A commentary on Scaff et al. (2025). Developmental Science, 28, e70050.

Bruggeman, L., Kidd E., Nordlinger, R., & Cutler, R. (2025). Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha). Cognition, 257: 106075.

Donnelly, S., Kidd, E., Verkuilen, J., & Rowland, C. F. (2025). The separability of early vocabulary and grammar knowledge. Journal of Memory and Language, 141: 104586.

Garcia, R., Roeser, J., Vargas, J. C., Fathin, S., & Kidd, E. (2025). Teasing apart the impact of different forms of overlap on cross-linguistic structural priming. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience.

Kumarage, S., Malko, A., & Kidd, E. (2025). Indexing prediction error during syntactic priming via pupillometry. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 40, 930 – 950.

Passmore, S., Hellwig, B., Garcia, R., & Kidd, E. (2025). The scientific and cultural cost of convenience sampling in the face of rising language endangerment: Highlighting the role of language acquisition. Open Mind, 9, 501 - 514

Thothathiri, M., Kidd, E., & Rowland, C. F. (2025). The role of executive function in the processing and acquisition of syntax. Royal Society Open Science, 12: 201497.

Verhoef, E., De Hoyos, L., Schlag, F., Van der Ven, J., Olislagers, M., Dale, P., Kidd, E., Fisher, S. E., & St Pourcain, B. (2025). Developing language in a developing body: Genetic associations of infant motor and personal-social skills with emerging language abilities. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Carr, G. (2025). Turning your thesis into a book: Advice for publishing a monograph in functional linguistics. Language, Context and Text, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00083.car

Evans, Nicholas. 2025. Archaeolinguistics and the languages of hunter-gatherers. In Martine Roberts & Mark Hudson (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 221-248.

Evans, Nicholas. 2025. From both sides now: revisiting Dalabon kintax. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 45.3. DOI 10.1080/07268602.2025.2537026

François, Alexandre. (2025) Non-verbal predicates in Oceanic languages. In Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci & Denis Creissels (eds), Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Volume 2: Africa, Austronesia, Papunesia, Australia, 1023–1066. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 9.) Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.

François, Alexandre & Sandrine Bessis. (2025) La mémoire orale du peuple de Kuwae, île mythique du Vanuatu. Journal de la Société des Océanistes. 160-161, 239–243.

O’Shannessy, Carmel, Jennifer Green, Vanessa Davis, Jessie Bartlett, Alice Nelson, Ashleigh Jones, and Denise Foster. "Multimodal strategies for engaging young Arrernte and Warlpiri children in storytelling and play." Australian Journal of Linguistics (2025): 1-26. https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1080/07268602.2025.2514175

Wang, Yizhou, Carmel O'Shannessy, Vanessa Davis, Rikke Bundgaard‐Nielsen & Denise Foster. "An acoustic study on monophthongs in Central Australian Aboriginal English." World Englishes (2025). https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1111/weng.70003

Planer, Ronald J and Lauren W Reed. 2025. Interactive repair in homesign reveals the theory-of-mind abilities that may well have driven language evolution. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-025-00776-x

Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Catherine E. Travis. 2025. Parallel linguistic and sociocultural change: Modals and mores. Acting on actuation, ed. by Henrik De Smet, Guglielmo Inglese and Malte Rosemeyer, 57-75. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/507

Travis, Catherine E. and Qiao Gan. 2025. The intersection of ethnicity and social class in language variation and change. Language Variation and Change. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394525100537

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2025. The Nicene Creed in Minimal English, Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts. Palgrave.

Ye, Zhengdao and Janet Davey. 2025. Thick translation, migrants’ life narratives and transnational literacy: exploring Chinese migrants’ place-making in modern Australian society. Journal of Intercultural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2025.2541321

Paper Presentations

Carr, G., Goncharov, L., Slade, D. & Mitchell, I. (2025). ‘We couldn’t ask for a better end of life scenario’: Dignity and decision making in a Geriatrics patient journey. International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Glasgow, Scotland, 7-11 July.
Carr, G. (2025). Technicality and iconisation: Building fields and building communities in sex education. International Systemic Functional Congress, University of Glasgow, Scotland, 7-11 July.
Davey, Kira and Barth, Danielle (2025, Aug 4-7). Clause chaining (in)variability in Matukar Panau. New Ways of Analysing Variation Asia Pacific 8. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Keith, Emma and Arka, I Wayan (2025). Pronominal indexing system and the changing face of Austronesian voice: Insights from Sipora Mentawai. Presented at the 30th International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference, Barcelona. (to be submitted to proceedings)
O’Shannessy, C, S. Li, V. Davis, J. Bartlett, A. Nelson, D. Foster, B. Wood. 2025. ‘Little kids learning Warlpiri consonants’. Puliima conference on Indigenous languages and technology, Darwin Convention Centre, Aug 25 – 29.
O’Shannessy, Carmel. 2025. ‘Glimpses of collaborative documentation of language practices in central Australia’. Syracuse University, NY, Sept 26, 2025.
de Vos, Connie; Reed, Lauren; Safar, Josefina; & Lutzenberger, Hannah (2025). A pragmatic typological study of minimal backchannels in five sociolinguistically diverse sign languages. Paper presented at 10th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, 11 July.

New editorship

Evan Kidd is the Linguistics Section editor of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science and ANU PhD student Caroline Hendy is one the initiative’s student editors (https://oecs.mit.edu/). OECS is an update of the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (MITECS, 1999), but is fully open access and available online. The Language section now has over 30 entries, which will continue to grow over the next year or so (https://oecs.mit.edu/language). Each entry is an accessible introduction to a topic, written for interested non-experts and useful for undergraduate teaching. The initiative was made possible with generous funding from the McDonnell Foundation and MIT Press.

Research visit

Neda Karimi was invited by A/Prof Mariana Pascual to the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile for a research visit. During her stay, she will present her mixed-methods research on alignment at the Coloquio Permanente de Lingüística y Traducción and share her work on adolescent health communication at the Ciclo de Charlas con Investigadores en Discurso y Salud seminar. She will also deliver a guest lecture in a postgraduate methodology class within the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature.

New website:

https://voicesofregionalaustralia.com/

A new website developed for the ‘Voices of Regional Australia’ project (ARC DP awarded to Catherine Travis, Ksenia Gnevsheva, and Gerry Docherty). Learn about the project and listen to some of the stories that have been collected about facing natural disasters and living in regional Australia

Wayan Arka and Zhengdao Ye

Jawun Research Institute (Central Queensland University)

Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald finished overseeing the production process of her new monograph Noun categorization: a comprehensive typology, to be published in early 2026. She has finalised a comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea, in typological perspective (c. 150,000 words), which has been submitted to a publisher. She is also working on a monograph provisionally entitled Versatile morphology: person marking and affixation in Arawak languages. Jointly with Dr Gülshen Sakhatova (University of Cyprus, Nicosia), she is preparing for publication an edited volume Do ghosts dream? Evidentiality and the supranatural across languages and cultures (Oxford University Press). She is responsible for bringing to fruition the Second Edition of the Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (now with 32 chapters), edited jointly with R. M. W. Dixon (to appear in 2027). She is responsible for organising the Multidisciplinary Seminar Series ‘Communication, health, and social and cultural well-being’, and, jointly with Dr Darren Walker (CQU), for coordinating the new Seminar Series ‘The Cairns Research Think-Tank’ (CRITTERs), and jointly with Professor Rosita Henry (CQU/JCU), seminars within the ‘Cairns Linguistic and Anthropology Seminar series’ (CLASS) at Jawun Research Institute.

She 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). 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 (‘Children of the Blood of Thunder’) in Iauaretê. She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. She continues her work as Etymology consultant for South American languages, for Oxford English Dictionary (c. 2 entries per month). She continues intensive collaboration with the Hiwatahia Association of the Taino People (with the centre in the Dominican Republic), under the leadership of Casike Jorge Barracutei Estevez, sharing her expertise in Arawak languages, so as to support revitalisation and reconstitution of the Taino language (the first Indigenous group in the Caribbean encountered by Columbus in 1492).

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

‘Evidentiality and social action: language ecology, cognition, and change’, 'Evidentiality in the languages of Asia', 14-16 November 2025, University of Macao.
'The world through the prism of language: what are gender and classifiers good for?', 12 November 2025, University of Macao (a general lecture).

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is continuing his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendents 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 institute. His new monograph The anatomy of avoidance: A full story of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal 'mother-in-law language' was published in 2025, by DeGruyterBrill. It has a foreword by Professor Adrian Miller, a proud member of the Jirrbal nation. Bob recently celebrated sixty years of work on the languages of the Cairns rainforest region in North Queensland. Besides Dyirbal, he was able to do considerable work on Yidiny, and as much as was then possible with the speakers of Warrgamay, Nyawaygi, and Mbabaram. He published grammars and vocabularies of these four languages which the descendants of the speakers he worked with are utilising in order to regain something of their cultural heritage. He continues consulting members of the Dyirbal and the Yidinji nation on various issues, especially naming (e.g. naming the former police station in Edmonton (Cairns), now transformed into a Yidinji Cultural Centre).

Bob is now working on a historical survey of comparative work on Australian languages, trying to distinguish between sound work and speculation. He is also writing an essay on the nature of grammars, relating in large part to his two grammars of Dyirbal (1972) and (2022).

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

Dr Pema Wangdi, an expert on 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, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Naples L’Orientale. He is continuing his research on Tiang and Konomala, two Oceanic languages of Papua New Guinea. His current focus is on the documentation of the language and culture of the Konomala community and the reconstruction of the past of southern New Ireland. Together with Lidia Mazzitelli, he was awarded an ELF Language Legacies Grant in June 2025, which will be used to print bilingual story books for schools in the Konomala and Lavatbura-Lamasong areas. He is revising his PhD for publication and on various aspects of Oceanic languages of New Ireland and preparing a grammar of Konomala.

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

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, and on various issues in Austronesian languages of Taiwan.

Professor Rosita Henry’s Adjunct Appointment has been renewed. She continues her work on gender and social change across the Pacific, and on culture and festivals in Queensland and beyond, with special attention to First Nations, and the the issues of language revitalisation and maintenance across FNQ, with special attention to Jirrbal communities. She will continue co-organising the seminar series Cairns Linguistics and Anthropology Seminars and a number of discussion panels dealing with language and social anthropology.

Professor Michael Walsh’s Adjunct Appointment is in the process of being renewed. He will continue working on various matters concerning language reclamation and language and well-being among the Australian First Nations.

Visiting scholars in 2025

Professor Haiping Long, Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University, specialising in grammaticalisation, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and discourse grammar, with a focus on minority languages of China and Chinese, visited the Jawun Research Institute in June-July 2025. He presented a seminar ‘Clause-medial development and positional shifts of subjective adverbials’ on 30 June (Monday), 3-5.30 (zoom and face-to-face). The recording is available upon request.

High Degree by Research Students Projects Highlights (Linguistics)

Linguistics-related projects (starting and on-going)

Piar Karim (Karakoram International University, Gilgit Baltistan, MA in linguistics at the University of Northern Texas) is planning to start his PhD ‘The Grammar of Bodily States and Health-Related Terms in Burushaski: How Language Carries the Weight of Well-being’, under the supervision of Professor A. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon. A summary is as follows:

‘This research will explore how Burushaski speakers talk about their bodily experiences— pain, illness, healing, discomfort, and recovery. It is a study grounded not just in grammatical patterns but in everyday life, traditional healing practices, and the spiritual beliefs that shape understandings of health and well-being. The project focuses on the language of the Burusho people in Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin valleys, and builds on work like Lorimer’s early documentation (1935), Berger’s grammatical analysis (1998), and Sadaf Munshi’s and Karim Piar’s more recent ethnolinguistic and language documentation studies (2013). The study contributes a Himalayan perspective to the broader comparative research program How well-being needs language, which looks at how communities around the world use language to express and maintain their health. This project will also document oral healing narratives from individuals in various villages, capturing personal experiences of illness and recovery. These stories—often passed down through generations—offer unique insights into local understandings of the body, spirit, and environment. They are critical to preserving cultural memory and indigenous health practices that are vanishing rapidly.’

Claudio Fuenzalida (University of Bern) is working on a PhD thesis ‘Multiverbal predicates in Mapudungun’, based on first-hand fieldwork based research with the Mapuche people (speakers of the Mapudungun language, one of the largest languages in South America) and a corpus of narratives of diverse genres. His supervisors are Professor Fernando Zuúñiga (University of Bern) and Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald.

Marijke Bassani, a Research Officer at Jawun Research Institute, is working on Welcoming the Unwelcome: (Re)claiming space as the Black Indigenous Rainbow ‘Other’. Marijke commenced her PhD, 2018 (University of California, Berkeley, University of New South Wales, and CQU). Marijke is a Lamalama, Binthi Warra and Bulgun Warra gender and sexuality diverse woman raised on the sovereign lands of her people, the Guugu Yimithirr Nation, in the Cape York Peninsula of Far North Queensland. Marijke speaks Guugu Yimithirr as a first language, and South-east Cape York Creole as her second. The anticipated influential impact of Marijke’s PhD work was recently recognised by Oxford University who invited her to contribute a chapter on First Nations gender and sexuality diversity in the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Peoples and International Law (2024), including a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford University Press book on Cultural Heritage Law and Policy (2025) which she will be delivering in-person at the Oxford University Press Book launch and workshop held in Munich, Germany later this year. Her supervisors are Professor Leti Volpp (UC Berkeley), Associate Professor Maria Giannacopoulos (UNSW) and Dr Vicki Saunders (CQUniversity).

Christie Mancktelow is a Proud Ngugi woman doing her Master of Research Thesis in the School of Health, Medical and Applied Science (CQU), on ‘Our Languages, Identity and Wellbeing: A Quandamooka Perspective’.

An important element of culture is language, and literature to date states our First Languages remain under threat. This study will explore the effect of Jandai and Gowar language use on the identity and wellbeing of the Ngugi, Nunukul and Goenpul Peoples from Quandamooka Country. The study will explore the underpinning research question: What are the effects of language on identity and wellbeing for Ngugi, Nunukul and Goenpul peoples from Quandamooka Country. The study is largely qualitative; however, the virtual yarns will allow for a quantitative component. The research will highlight the importance of language to closing the health gap for First Nations’ Peoples in Australia and could inform future policy and or policy changes that impact our languages.

Bettina Wechselberger is a Doctor of Education (EdD) candidate within the School of Education and the Arts at CQU. She is working on a Design Based Research project, collaboratively designing a multilingual approach to support reading in a superdiverse primary school. Informed by translanguaging theory and strategies, this project uses language mapping to raise awareness of students’ rich language resources and then collaboratively explores ways to draw on these resources in classroom reading lessons. Language mapping is a form of identity text which allows students to draw a map of how and where they use different languages at school, at home and in the community. TThe students’ language maps serve as powerful visual reminders of the linguistic superdiversity in some Queensland classrooms that is the principle at the centre of the collaborative design workshops with monolingual staff. Her supervisors are Professor Margaret Kettle and Dr Miriam Ham.

Alumni Highlights

Dr Hannah Sarvasy, currently Senior Researcher at the MARCS Institute (WSU), and our alumna, has been awarded a highly prestigious grant by the European Research Council, to work on ‘Cognitive and developmental effects of Indigenous language loss in Papua New Guinea’ (to the value of over 2 million euro). Congratulations to Hannah!

Dr Katarzyna I. Wojtylak, currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warsaw and our alumna, presented or will present the following talks, across the world:

2025 ‘Reclaiming Voices: Trauma, Language Loss, and Revitalization in the Caquetá-Putumayo Region’. To be presented at Interdisciplinary Workshop on Language and Trauma; Grassroots multilingualism, trauma and healing. Revitalization and minoritized experiences. Wilamowice, Poland. 23-24 Sep.
2025 ‘Semantic categorization in Witotoan classifiers from Northwest Amazonia: Exploring patterns across the language family’. To be presented at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) 2025.
2025 with Alexandra Aikhenvald ‘The language of coca: Tracing the spread of ‘coca’ in Amazonian languages’. To be presented at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) 2025.
2025 ‘Linguistic Dynamics in Caquetá-Putumayo: A Morphosyntactic Perspective.’ Presented at Amazonicas X. Universidad Federal de Pará, Belén, Brasil. 16 Aug.
2025 with Juan Alvaro Echeverri and Frank Seifart. ‘Amazonian Crossroads: Multilingual Practices in the Caquetá-Putumayo Area.’ Presented at Amazonicas X. Universidad Federal de Pará, Belén, Brasil. 12-16 Aug 2025.
2025 ‘Elders’ Voices, Multilingual Pasts: Ancestral Memories from the Caquetá-Putumayo Region of Colombia’. SALSA XV Conference. Helsinki. 06 Aug.
2025 ‘Cantos de la Selva: Multilingüismo, Territorio y Cantos entre los Pueblos huitoto del Noroeste Amazónico’. Presented at CEPIAL: Conflits, Éco-territoires, Plurilinguisme et Interculturalité en Amérique latine, Journée Internationale d'Étude - Éco-territoires plurilingues d'Amérique latine : (Dé)lier les langues. Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Pessac, France. 5 Jun.

New publications by members of the cluster (late 2024-2025)

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. ‘Language and knowledge’, in ‘The International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics’, 3rd Edition, edited by Nico Nassenstein and Svenja Völkel. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. ‘Name taboo’, in ‘The International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics’, 3rd Edition, edited by Nico Nassenstein and Svenja Völkel. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. Verbless clauses in Arawak languages, pp. 505-537 of Verbless clauses and copula clauses, edited by Pier Marco Bertinetto, Denis Creissels, and Luca Ciucci. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon. 2025. ‘Anthropological linguistics and language documentation’, in ‘The International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics’, 3rd Edition, edited by Nico Nassenstein and Svenja Völkel. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Völkel, Svenja and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. 2025. ‘Language and gender’, in ‘The International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics’, 3rd Edition, edited by Nico Nassenstein and Svenja Völkel. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Dixon, R. M. W. 2025. The anatomy of avoidance. A Full Study of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal 'Mother-in-Law Language. Berlin: DeGruyter/Brill; https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783111464473/html?lang=en

Upcoming seminars

Wednesday 5 November 2025, 3-5 pm.

Professor Craig Volker (JCU/ Beijing Foreign Studies University). ‘Urban Lagiri: One man’s community initiative to teach language and culture in a Papua New Guinea primary school’. CQU Cairns, room 3.06 or via zoom, Meeting 818 0184 7375, passcode 989806

A special launch of three books is planned for 3 November 2025,

9.30-11 am, CQU University, Cairns CBD (room 2.26):

Dixon, R. M. W. 2025. The anatomy of avoidance. A full study of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal mother-in-law language’. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111464473/

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. A guide to gender and classifiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-gender-and-classifiers-9780198863601

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., Anne Storch, and Viveka Vellupilai. 2025. Language in strange and familiar places. Linguistic research in unchartered territories. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111707501/

Further information will be available soon on https://www.cqu.edu.au/research/organisations/jawun-research-institute

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages (ACAL)

Staff update

ACAL welcomed three new staff in the period:

Samuel Daniels is a proud Iman person and Assistant Director of Languages at AIATSIS. He has previously worked as a journalist in digital innovation projects at Queensland State Government and managed major not-for-profit initiatives.
Angus Dyason. Angus is currently studying a Juris Doctorate at the Australian National University. Before joining the public service, he volunteered and worked with the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation in Maningrida, Arnhem Land. Since then, Angus has worked in various policy and project roles in the Department of the Prime Minster and Cabinet and the Department of the Environment.
Laura Regan. Laura has her masters in linguistics from the Australian National University, where she completed research on NSW Aboriginal languages. She has also worked as a tutor for the Master of Indigenous Languages Education (MILE) program at Sydney University, and as a research assistant for the Dharug language dictionary.

AustLang

The major revamp of the AustLang database is almost complete. ACAL will be presenting on the new reimagined AustLang at the 2025 Australian Linguistics Society Conference in December and we anticipate the launch of the new database by Christmas 2025. In the meantime, an interim version of the AustLang database is still available at https://aiatsis.gov.au/AustLang. Please contact AustLang@aiatsis.gov.au to report any issues or provide any feedback.

Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey

In July, ACAL concluded a series of workshops to co-design the Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS4). Eight on-Country and eight online workshops with Indigenous languages stakeholders were held across Australia in partnership with peak language organisations. Attendees shared their diverse experiences working with language as teachers, Elders, language centre staff, interpreters, linguists and representatives from government organisations.

Following co-design, the survey instrument was drafted, and validation workshops were held for co-design participants to provide feedback on how their insights were incorporated into the survey. Key feedback was that defining language strength is more complex than measuring the number of speakers and whether the language is being passed on between generations. As such, the survey questions consider different ways language strength can be defined depending on the language context, including how and where languages are spoken.

The survey is currently undergoing ethics review and is due to begin roll-out at the end of 2025. The survey will be emailed to people and/or organisations that have been identified by state-based language peaks and/or AIATSIS’ networks as “language respondents”. These are people who have the authority to speak for a given Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language, e.g. Elders or language centre managers. ACAL are hoping to expand the number of languages covered compared to NILS3, particularly in areas with a data gap, such as central and southwest Queensland.

Paper and Talk

AIATSIS and Living Languages will deliver the fifth Paper and Talk workshop at Maraga, Canberra, between 13th and 24th October 2025. The two-week workshop will provide comprehensive archival and linguistics training sessions to facilitate access to archival language resources held at AIATSIS and other archives which may hold relevant materials. Participants will be able to showcase a language resource that they develop during the workshop to the cohort in the second week.

This year, AIATSIS will welcome 14 community researchers from 5 language groups, along with a linguist support partner for each of the language groups. The language groups participating are Adnyamathanha. Bundjalung, Muruwari, Taungurung, and Ngarigo / Ngarigu.

Other highlights

Congratulations to Kaitlyn Lodewikus, who graduated as one of the inaugural cohort of the Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalisation at the University of Queensland.
AIATSIS funded the Top End Language Forum (TELF) at Charles Darwin University, 3-5 June 2025. TELF hosted language champions from across more than 10 communities across the Top End of the Northern Territory. The aim of the forum was for language groups to gather and discuss their work and bond through experiences of language advocacy and "Märr" a Yolŋu Matha word relating to spiritual power or passionate force that drives Indigenous Australians language work.
AIATSIS is sponsoring 10 Indigenous delegates to attend the 2025 ALS Conference.

AIATSIS Summit

The 2025 AIATSIS Summit was hosted in partnership with Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) at the Darwin Convention Centre (Garramilla) from 2 to 6 June 2025. The Summit incorporated GLAM and Research topics (2-4 June) and Indigenous Country and Governance topics (4-6 June), along with a dedicated Youth and Emerging Leadership stream across the 5 days. Recorded keynote presentations are available to view here: https://aiatsis.gov.au/whats-new/events/aiatsis-summit-2025.

Presentations

Avery, Z., Thompson, R. & Leslie-O’Neill. 2025. ‘The Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey: Reimagining Measures of Language Strength’. ANU Seminar Series. Canberra, 19 September, 2025.
Gibbs, J., Leslie-O’Neill, H. & Avery, Z. ‘The Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey: Reimagining Measures of Language Strength’. PULiiMA 2025, Darwin, 27-29 August, 2025.
Reed, L. & Daniels S. 2025. ‘Celebrating Language: AIATSIS Dictionaries Program in Focus’. 2025 AIATSIS Summit. Darwin, 2-6 June, 2025.
Santo, W. Anderson, A., Avery, Z. & Lodewikus, K. 2025. ‘Yaru!: A Journey of Gudjal Language Reclamation’. 2025 AIATSIS Summit. Darwin, 2-6 June, 2025.
Smith, R. 2025. From archives to action! AIATSIS paper and talk workshop panel of community researchers’. 2025 AIATSIS Summit. Darwin, 2-6 June, 2025.

Alexandra Marley

News from Garrthalala Bush University

Linguistics in the bush: Working with Language course at Garrthalala Bush Uni

Garrthalala Bush University (GBU) is a regional study hub in north-east Arnhem Land that supports Yolŋu communities, through a partnership between Laynhapuy Homelands Aboriginal Corporation, Macquarie University and the Australian National University. In September GBU launched ‘Working with Language’, an adapted version of the Macquarie University undergraduate unit LING1121 Language Myths and Realities. ‘Working with Language’ has just been approved as a micro credential, as equivalent to a 10 credit point (AQF Level 6) undergraduate unit of study, with the accreditation process led by Emilie Ens and MQ Unit Convenor Joe Blythe.

The course is being delivered by a group of linguists from ANU, Macquarie and EPHE Paris, along with the Garrthalala Bush Uni staff: Nick Evans, Frances Morphy, Haoyi Li, Bulpunu Munuŋgurr, Rurruwiliny Ŋurruwutthun, and Amina Mettouchi.

The course gives an introduction to linguistics aimed at speakers of Yolŋu languages. All 10 students are first-language speakers of a Yolŋu language. A parallel course on Yolŋu History, predominantly taught by Yolŋu guest presenters, is being led by Yananymul Munuŋgurr, with additional input from Bridget Campbell, Haoyi Li and Howard Morphy with the valuable operational support of Chloe Hunt and Hudson Munuŋgurr from Laynha.

The teaching is temporarily housed at the Ranger station at Garrthalala while permanent study hub is being built nearby at Gamburriŋga, for 2026 first semester (hopefully). Lecturers and students are in tents, eating and spending most waking hours together from exercises every morning to Buŋgul on the beach after class. By good fortune, during the second week of the course Garrthalala hosted the 50th anniversary of the homelands movement - see ABC story at

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-20/nt-laynhapuy-homelands-movement-anniversary-indigenous-yolngu/105796404?sfnsn=wa

Nick Evans and Joe Blythe

Forthcoming Event

Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

Griffith University, Gold Coast, 2 – 5 December 2025

For further information and updates please see the ALS website or send an email to the ALS2025 Conference team: conf@als.asn.au

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.

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