Emeritus Professor Andrew Pawley FRSNZ FAHA died in Canberra on 22 March 2026, nine days before his 85th birthday, after years with Parkinson's Disease. The title of his 2010 Festschrift A journey through Austronesian and Papuan linguistic and cultural space http://hdl.handle.net/1885/146763 indicates the core but not the whole breadth and depth of his linguistics work. Andy’s autobiographical memoir in Te Reo 61.2 (2018) https://nzlingsoc.org/journal_article/memoirs-of-an-anthropological-linguist/ is, as Darja Hoenigman says "a great read, and those who didn't know him will get a feel for what kind of a person he was — and how broad and vast his scholarship".

David Wilkins

Many linguists joined the large gathering in Sydney on 14 February 2026 in memory of David Wilkins (1958-2025). David had died in Sydney on 13 October aged 67, as announced then in ALS Online. Some tributes, and his works, are listed in https://www0.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/wilkins.html

News from the University of New England (UNE)

In Memoriam

We are mourning the passing of Charlotte Gooskens, who was an Associate Professor at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at UNE. Her research focused on the perceptual and communicative effects of language variation, including language attitudes, speaker identity, and the mutual intelligibility of closely related languages. Researchers from near and far sought out Charlotte’s expertise and insights. In her typical low-key fashion, she had a knack for asking just the right questions. She seemed oblivious to her own accomplishments and unselfconsciously brought out the best in other people.

Charlotte’s affiliation with UNE was the result of a 13-year collaboration with Dr Cindy Schneider. Their joint work examined mutual intelligibility between native and non-native varieties of English, and between closely related varieties spoken on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, where they spent time in 2015.

She is deeply missed by her husband and children in the Netherlands, her parents and brother in Denmark, and her many friends, colleagues and students around the world.

New Adjunct Appointment

UNE Linguistics warmly welcomes the appointment of our adjunct appointments:

Dr Inés Antón-Méndez, Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Linguistics. Dr. Antón-Méndez is a psycholinguist with broad interests including language production and memory. She has worked on the crosslinguistic differences of syntax processing, bilingualism, second language learning, and dyslexia. Her expertise lies in experimental design and quantitative methodology.

Dr Prerna Bakshi, Adjunct Lecturer in Linguistics. Dr Bakshi’s areas of interest include language politics, language policy and planning, teacher cognition, language ideology, multilingualism, language contact, and South Asian linguistics. She has published works in sociolinguistics, social psychology, and educational and political sociology.

Dr Diana Guillemin, Adjunct Lecturer in Linguistics. Her areas of interest include syntax, semantics, linguistic typology, determiner systems, creole languages, language contact processes, and literacy acquisition in multicultural contexts. She has published and edited works on language description and theoretical linguistics.

Publications

Books

Ndhlovu, Finex & Jesta Masuku. (2025). Pan-African Integration from Below: Language, Publics, Culture. Mandela University Press.

This book reimagines Pan-Africanism through the lived experiences of diasporic and cross-border African communities. Grounded in ethnographic research conducted with African diasporas in Australia and informal traders at three major African ports of entry, this book brings a vital, bottom-up perspective to one of the continent’s most enduring political dreams.

Drawing on the interrelated fields of language, publics, and culture, the book introduces the vernacular discourse approach, a powerful framework that centres grassroots voices as active agents in shaping cultural and political life. It challenges dominant narratives rooted in colonial and state-centric ideologies and highlights the creative and resilient ways in which local actors build spaces to live, thrive, and express identity on their own terms.

Edited Books:

Guillemin, Diana. (2025). Evidence of topic-prominence in Mauritian Creole: A typological shift from French to Creole. In Alleesaib, Muhsina & Julie Lefort (eds), New Perspectives on Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole: Standardization, grammar and language use. John Benjamins, 49-95.

Hunt, Jaime W., Palmer, William D., & Iyengar, Arvind V. (2025). “The gender of nominal Anglicisms across language families and regions: A typological study.” In H. Gottlieb, A. Niculescu-Gorpin, A. Witalisz, K. Imamura & J. W. Hunt, Anglicisms around the Globe: Cross-linguistic Studies on the Impact of English (pp. 159–190). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003516781-9

Journal Articles

Kerswell, Timothy & Prerna Bakshi. (2025). When words fail: readability, public diplomacy, and China’s strategic communication gap in Australia. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-025-00424-2.

Schneider, Cindy, Charlotte Gooskens, Owen Kapelle, & Inés Antón-Méndez. (2025). English and Bislama in professional contexts: Perspective from an intelligibility study in Vanuatu. Te Reo 68(3) Vanuatu languages in action [Special Issue], edited by Tihomir Rangelov, Eleanor Ridge, Lana Takau & Victoria Chen. (pp. 20-60).

Séverin, Noémie. (2025). Efate and Shepherd Islands language ecology. Te Reo 68(2) Vanuatu languages in context [Special Issue], edited by T. Rangelov, E. Ridge, L. Takau & V. Chen. (pp. 246-291).

Smith-Khan, Laura. (2026). Intercultural Communication in Migration Law Education. In T. Grieshofer & K. Haworth (Eds.), Language and Justice: Communication in Legal Practice (pp. 217–231). Chapter 15, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith-Khan, Laura. (2025). Incredible language and refugee legal processes: Challenging asylum credibility assessments. In J Setter et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice. Chapter 26, Oxford University Press, 2025.

Smith-Khan, Laura. (2026). ‘Submission to Inquiry on Migration (Administrative Review Council),’ 27 January 2026. Available from: https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.34632.38403

Reference Material:

Arvind Iyengar has created a website that brings together the two standard manifestations of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in the Latin (or Roman) and Braille scripts. Titled IPA (Braille & Latin), it aims to serve as a reference resource for students and researchers in phonetics, grapholinguistics and related disciplines.

Visit the site at ipa.bhasha.net. For more on its features and the motivation behind it, here’s a brief write-up by Arvind.

Presentations

Eades, Diana. “Challenges for the Law in Listening to Aboriginal People Speaking Englishes”. Invited presentation, opening plenary panel. International Pragmatics Conference, Brisbane, June 2, 2025

PhD student Noémie Séverin has given four talks recently:

“Mutual intelligibility studies: adapting to Vanuatu context”, National University of Vanuatu, 16 June 2025.
“Exploring the language distribution of Efate and the Shepherd Islands – A contemporary overview”, Vanuatu National Cultural Center for the Friends of the Museum, 17 June 2025.
“Adapting mutual intelligibility studies for Oceanic languages”, 13^th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL-13), ANU, 26 June 2025.
“Reimagining language boundaries: Mutual intelligibility in Efate and Shepherd islands in Central Vanuatu”, American Association of Applied Linguistics, Chicago, 22 March 2026.

Noémie also received a stipend for COOL-13, which included return travel to Canberra, accommodation during the conference, and registration fees.

Smith-Khan, L. ‘Language, Migration and Legal Literacy’ (invited seminar), Literacy in Diversity Settings Research Centre, Hamburg University, Germany, 17 October 2025.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025). Another “Australian Model”? Audio-recordings and transcripts in the (re)construction of refugee credibility (working paper presentation), (Re-)constructing Credibility in Refugee Status Determination, Special Issue Workshop, MOBILE Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law at the University of Copenhagen, 23-24 October 2025.

Smith-Khan, L. ‘Developing Legal Literacy across Languages’ (invited plenary presentation), Philippine Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics 1^st Biennial Asian Conference, Bukidnon State University, Mindanao, Philippines, 25 November 2025.

Law and Language Interdisciplinary Teaching Studies

In late 2025, Dr Laura Smith-Khan and Dr Alexandra Grey (UTS) supervised an internship project through their Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Research Network to develop a set of interdisciplinary teaching resources. As part of the project, the network intern, Allegra Holmes à Court, a final year law and linguistics student at ANU, interviewed nine Australian academics working across multiple disciplines and at universities in four different jurisdictions, who have incorporated law and language research into their teaching. The project has resulted in the development of a library of teaching materials, and a set of teaching case studies to serve as resources for network members and colleagues. Published case studies can be found on the Law and Language website.

PhD Completion

Rukiya Stein completed her PhD after minor corrections, in March 2026, under the supervision of Laura Smith-Khan and Sharl Marimuthu in the School of Law, after transferring from the University of Newcastle part-way through her candidature. Rukiya’s thesis is entitled Intermediaries: Enabling

Adults with Disabilities to ‘Tell their Story’ in the Australian Criminal Justice Process. In it, Rukiya draws on her professional experience as a Witness/Communication Intermediary in the Australian criminal justice system. As a thesis by publication, it also includes a number of already published and forthcoming papers, including some co-authored with her UoN supervisors, Professors Jane Goodman-Delahunty and Tania Sourdin, and another with leading UK scholar, Emeritus Professor Ray Bull.

Media

Dr Piers Kelly and Alwyn Doolan discussed message sticks with David Marr, host of ABC’s Late Night Live, on 13 May 2025. Click here to listen: Message sticks: small items with big cultural power - ABC listen

Promotions

Professor Finex Ndhlovu was recently promoted to Level E.

And Dr Prashneel R. Goundar was promoted to Senior Lecturer [Level C].

Congratulations to both!

Cindy Schneider

News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)

Diploma of First Nations Language Work

The Diploma of First Nations Language Work(YFLW01) is now open for enrolment Grounded in First Nations language practices, perspectives and knowledges, the course provides an offering in languages, linguistics and language teaching, enhancing and strengthening knowledge and skills that students bring with them. Flexible learning options are available for First Nations students, including attending face-to-face workshop blocks held on-campus in Darwin where free travel from anywhere in Australia and catered accommodation on-campus is offered during the workshops through Away-From-Base. See here for further details, or get in touch with James Bednall (james.bednall@cdu.edu.au) for general queries, or the First Nations Student Services team fnssreception@cdu.edu.au for enrolment support.

New projects

Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic Primary School working with Cris Edmonds-Wathen have been awarded $90,000 over 3 years by Schools Plus to work on Mathematics in Tiwi (2026-2028).

Awni Etaywe has signed a book contract with Cambridge Unviersity Press: Zappavigna, M., Etaywe, A., & Doran, Y. (in preparation). Tenor in the machine: Interpersonal meaning in conversations with Large Language Model chatbots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Publications

Bednall, J.(2025). ‘Grammatical case and differential argument marking in Anindilyakwa’ in C. O’Shannessy, J. Gray & D. Angelo (eds.) Projecting voices: Studies in language and linguistics in honour of Jane Simpson (pp. 431-458) Canberra, Australia: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. http://doi.org/10.22459/PV.2025

Caudal, P. & Bednall, J. (eds.) (2025). “Modalité dans les langues australiennes (Partie1) [Modality in Australian Languages (Part 1)]”. Faits de langues Special Issue 54(2). https://brill.com/view/journals/fdl/54/2/fdl.54.issue-2.xml

Caudal, P. & Bednall, J. (2025). Présentation du dossier: Modalité dans les langues australiennes [Overview of the volume: Modality in Indigenous Australian languages]. Faits de langues 54(2), 9-11. https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-54020003

Cebrian, J., Carlet, A., Gavaldà, N. & Gorba, C. (2025). Minimal effects of L2 phonetic training on non-naïve learners’ perception of cross-linguistic similarity. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation.

Edmonds-Wathen, C.(2026). Teaching them properly: Transforming professional identities in Pitjantjatjara mathematics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-025-10461-6

Edmonds-Wathen, C., Alimankinni, M., Bara, M., Bednall, J., Bennett, C., Carrol, S., Charlwood, K., Goldsworthy, L., Lalara, R., Nipper, L., Nyhuis, P., Peters, S., Puantulura, R. L., Wilmoth, S., & Yantarrnga, H. (2026). Strengthening language through first language mathematics education. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 49(2).https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.25034.edm

Etaywe, A. (2026). CDA/PDA of digital activism and discursive resistance to disinformation: Ethical tenor, positioning, counter-framing, and axiological bonding. Corpus Pragmatics, 10(30), 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-026-00231-x

Etaywe, A. (2026). A growing Jewish challenge to Israel’s war narrative. Pearls and Irritations – John Menadu’s Public Policy Journal.

Harrison, A., Riley, K., Osborne, S., Burton, N., Muthamuluwuy, B., & Hayashi, Y. (2025). Partnering in teaching ‘strong’Aboriginal languages at universities. In Projecting Voices: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson (pp. 933-956). ANU Press.

Muthamuluwuy, B., Waṉambi, G., Armstrong, E., & Hayashi, Y. (2026). Holding and practising Yolŋu concepts of märr and ŋayaŋu in Northern Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.

Segura, M., Knight, J., & Carlet, A. (2025). What gains and for whom? An analysis of pre-service teachers’ language gains and perceptions of linguistic and intercultural competence through a telecollaboration project. Computer Assisted Language Learning: An International Journal.

Tassev, V., Carlet, A., & Valls, M. P. (2025). Students’ Attitudes towards Native and Non-native English Teachers in the Thai EFL Tertiary Context. rEFLections, 32(3), 1594-1610.

Presentations

Bednall, J. (2025). Exploring two types of stylised sustained prosody in Anindilyakwa. Australian Linguistic Society Conference. 2-5 December 2025, Griffith University, Gold Coast.

Bednall, J., Alimankinni, M., Bara, M., Bennett, C., Carrol, S., Charlwood, K., Edmonds-Wathen, C., Goldsworthy, L., Kirlew, E., Lalara, R., Nipper, L., Nyhuis, P., Peters, S., Puantulura, R. L., Wilmoth, S., & Yantarrnga, H. (2025). Strengthening language through First Language mathematics education. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Charles Darwin University.

Wilmoth, S., & Edmonds-Wathen, C. (2025). A bit more puzzling: Comparison and beyond in Pitjantjatjara. Australian Linguistic Society, Griffith University.

Conference hosting

CDU Linguistics successfully hosted the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Conference, 17-19 November 2025. CDU welcomed more than 130 delegates from 23 countries to the event: https://www.cdu.edu.au/news/delegates-more-20-countries-descend-darwin-celebrate-multilingualism

New roles

Angélica Carlet is serving as a section editor of Open Linguistics (De Gruyter Brill).

Cris Edmonds-Wathen was invited to join the F-2 Australian Curriculum: Mathematics Advisory Group to assist the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) in providing advice to Education Ministers about challenges of implementing F-2 Australian Curriculum: Mathematics.

Outreach

Awni Etaywe was a guest on the podcast ‘Frontlines & Backrooms Podcast (Portugal)’ – (2026, February 16). Language, incitement, and Gaza. Spotify.

Top End Linguistic Circle (TELC)

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

James Bednall

News from the University of Queensland

Publications:

Alba-Juez, Laura and Michael Haugh (eds.) (2025).Sociopragmatics of Emotion. Cambridge University Press.

Chang, Wei-Lin Melody (2026). Sharing affect with the unacquainted: the role of conversational humor in initial interactions among Mandarin Chinese speakers. Humor-International Journal of Humour Research, 39(1), 61-93. Doi: 10.1515/humor-2025-0067

Ekberg, S., Danby, S.,Watts, J.,Weinglass, L., Cooke, R., Nelson, M., ... & Herbert, A. (2025). Involving Nonspeaking and Speaking Children in Clinical Encounters: An Observational Study of Real ‐World Clinical Encounters. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 62(2) 273-281.https://doi.org/10.1111/jpc.70253.

Gardner, Rod, Joe Blythe, Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear and Francesco Possemato. (2025). The making of multi-unit turns: A springloaded door. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haugh, Michael, Chang, Wei-Lin Melody and Sato, Yuji (2025). Negotiating interactional routines in the openings of intercultural first encounters. Intercultural Pragmatics, 22 (5), 1049-1079. doi: 10.1515/ip-2025-5007

Hua, X., Stewart, J., Bromham, L., Algy, C., & Meakins, F. (2025). New methods for modelling social salience across multiple variables. Language Variation and Change, 37, 319–344. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394526100659

Lee, Sheng-Hsun (2025). Health crisis communication: Multimodal classification for pandemic preparedness. Routledge. (Winner of the 2025 high distinction publication award, the Taiwan Association of Medical History and Dr. Tsungming Tu Foundation)

Wilmoth, S., Meakins, F., & Algy, C. (2025). Small language, big data: Building the Gurindji Kriol corpus to model the emergence of a mixed language. Journal of Language Documentation and Conservation, 19, 348-367. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74839

Exhibition:

The exhibition and book, both titled Wangka Wakanutja – The story of the Papunya Literature Production Centre are the latest and brightest outcomes of the collaboration between UQ’s Samantha Disbray, Papunya community researchers Charlotte Phillipus, Karen McDonald, Roslyn Dixon, Pricilla Brown and Dennis Nelson, and sociologist Vivien Johnson.

The exhibition shows from 4 April – 11 October 2026 at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, and the book, commissioned by NLA Publishing, is available in stores. The touring exhibition Wangka Walytja – The life and times of the Papunya Literature Production Centre is showing currently at the South Australian Museum until 8 June, 2026, with a public event on April 7th.

Dissertations!

Ahmad Almasarani (2026) Phonological and morphological dimensions of Rabighi Arabic: A descriptive analysis of an undocumented Saudi variety (Principal Advisor: Rob Pensalfini, Associate Advisor: Ilana Mushin).

Abdullah Alqarni (2025) Supervisor-initiated advice-giving activities in PhD supervision meetings. (Principal Advisor: Ilana Mushin, Associate Advisor: Michael Haugh).

Nicholas Hugman (2025). Towards a (Micro)Theory of Conversational Humour: The Interactional Accomplishment of Incongruity. (PA: Michael Haugh, AA: Valeria Sinkeviciute)

Andrea Rodriguez (2026). Accountability and Membership Categorisation in Spanish Multiparty Interaction. (PA: Valeria Sinkeviciute, AA: Michael Haugh).

Grants:

Sheng-hsun Lee ‘Strengthening equitable immunisation in Thailand: Evidence and engagement for migrant populations at risk of pertussis and other vaccine-preventable diseases.’ Regional Immunisation Strengthening and Engagement 2 (RISE-2), Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Role: Chief Investigator (A$222,750)

Michael Haugh: ‘Reusable and Accessible Public Interest Documents (RAPID) project’ Supported through co-investment by ARDC, UQ, QUT and QCIF, the RAPID project aims researchers and the public. For further information see: https://ardc.edu.au/project/reusable-and-accessible-public-interest-documents-rapid/.

Educations

The UQ Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalisation (2026-2027) is open for applications until Monday 20 July, 2026. The program runs from August to May each year, has flexible entry pathways and is delivered in four 1-week intensive blocks.

To find out more about Indigenous Language Revitalisation Program at UQ, visit our ILR webpage, sign up for our newsletter.

Contact ILR@uq.edu.au or Program Convenor, Samantha Disbray s.disbray@uq.edu.au

Ilana Mushin

News from the University of New South Wales

HDR completions

Congratulations to Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani for successful completion of PhD project Deconstructing Family Language Policy through Translanguaging in Spaces of Family and School: Indonesian Transnational Families in Australia. Principal Supervisor: A/Prof Aniko Hatoss; Secondary supervisors: Prof. Andy Gao, A/Prof Sally Baker.

Grants

Congratulations to Aniko Hatoss and Louise Ravelli (School of Arts and Media) for the successful award of an ARC Discovery Project “Boosting heritage languages: multimodality in urban and digital spaces”. Project summary: Heritage languages bring significant economic, social and cultural benefits for Australia. However, Australian youth from migrant backgrounds abandon their heritage language at a high rate. This project aims to enhance heritage languages by investigating how they are used in urban and digital spaces. The project uses a novel multimodal design to generate new knowledge about spatial factors in heritage language maintenance and to identify ideological aspects of language choice. Benefits include a better understanding of life, language and community in multicultural urban contexts as experienced by migrants. The project will support migrant families, enhance intercultural language awareness and has the potential to strengthen social harmony.

Events

A workshop on Language and Culture of Olfaction was held 14 November 2025. This brought together invited scholars from a range of humanities disciplines to explore the cultural significance of olfaction, how people perceive olfactory environments, and how olfaction is represented across different languages or contexts. It included linguistics papers from Thomas Poulton (La Trobe), Zhengdao Ye (ANU), Lila San Roque (ANU), Debra Aarons (UNSW) and Clair Hill (UNSW).

Publications

Chiaro, Delia and Debra Aarons. 2026. Playing with Food: Language, Humor and Disgust. Routledge Taylor and Francis. New York.

Hugues Peters, Christopher Laenzlinger & Gabriela Soare. 2025. L2 Acquisition of the Sequencing of Post-nominal Adjectives in French by English-speaking Learners Generative Grammar in Geneva. Volume 12 p.149-172.

Wang, Z., Hale, S. & Stern, L. 2026. ‘Establishing the contract’: Tribunal members’ practices when introducing interpreters and their role in migration review hearings. The international journal of Translation and Interpreting Research.Vol. 18, 1:19-33. DOI: 10.12807/ti.118201.2026.a02.

Hale, S., 2025. Legal Interpreting. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Forensic Linguistics), C.A. Chapelle & N. MacLeod (Eds.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0677.pub2

Hale, S.; Stern, L.; Lim, J.; Doherty, S. & Schwartz, M. .2025. Working with Judicial Officers in Domestic Courts: The Interpreter Perspective. T&I Review. 2025. Vol.15(2). Pages 7-32.

Hatoss A; Allport E. 2026. 'Towards epistemic and linguistic justice in universities: Exploring the Australian university linguascene from student perspectives', International Journal of Applied Linguistics United Kingdom, 36, pp. 222 - 241, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12611

Hill, Clair. 2025. An example of rich language documentation: A return to the Old Mission, in O’Shannessy, C., Gray, J., & Angelo, D. (Eds.). Projecting Voices: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson, ANU Press, pp. 981-1006. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.38479248.35

Sanjani MI; Hatoss A, 2026, 'Rethinking family language policy through translanguaging space', Language and Intercultural Communication, pp. 1-16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2026.2640153

Stern, L.; Hale, S.; Lim, J.; Doherty, S.& Schwartz, M. 2025. How do Judicial Officers Ensure Effective Interpreted Communication in Domestic Criminal Proceedings?. Implementation of Policies, Strategies, Practices and Access to Justice. Recht der Werkelijkheid, 46(3), 10-30.

https://doi.org/10.5553/RdW/138064242025046003002

Ourang M; Amberber M; Deligianni E, 2025, 'The derivation of the light verb construction in Aheli', in Fleischhauer J; Riccio A (ed.), Light Verb Constructions from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, De Gruyter, pp. 63-86.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783112229330-003

Conference presentations

Aarons, Debra. The Gag Reflex. Paper presented at the 32nd Australasian Humour Studies Network conference in Wellington NZ. 11-13 February 2026

Media interviews

Sandra Hale: 16/2/2026 – interviewed for the Nightlife ABC radio program by Phil Clark on court interpreting https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/lost-in-translation/106474734

Sandra Hale: 18/1/26 – Interviewed by ABC reporter: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-18/victorian-supreme-court-case-200-language-interpretation-errors/106173346?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=mail

Clair Hill

News from Monash University

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Börjars, Kersti & Kate Burridge 2026 (fourth substantially revised edition) Introducing English Grammar. London: Routledge

Manns, Howard & Xu, Zhichang 2026 Developing World Englishes: New Approaches for a Transmedia World. Cham, Switzerland

EDITED BOOKS

Biewer, Caroline & Kate Burridge (eds) 2025. Australasia and the Pacific. Chapters 107-119 of Kingsley Bolton (ed) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. London: Wiley Blackwell.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Schweinberger, Martin & Burridge, Kate 2025. Vulgarity in Online Discourse around the English-Speaking World. Lingua 321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946

Curry, N., & Peeters, W. (2025). Using cognitive behaviour therapy-based techniques for decreasing foreign language speaking anxiety and increasing confidence among EFL students: An intervention study. TESOL in Context, 34(1). https://doi.org/10.21153/tesol2025vol34no1art2180

Peeters, W., Consoli, S., Dai, D. W., & Tang, F. X. (2025). Navigating policy, pedagogy, and the self in TESOL. TESOL in Context, 34(1). https://doi.org/10.21153/tesol2025vol34no1art2278

Bahhari, A., & Willoughby, L. (2026). When heritage meets religion: Parents’ perspectives on Arabic language education in Australian Islamic schools. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 46(1), 117–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2025.2596103

Hlavac, J., Willoughby, L., Iwasaki, S., Manns, H., Bartlett, M., & Prain, M. (2026). Deafblind interpreter practice and training. Interpreting. 28(1) p. 122 - 151 https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00128.hla

Kashima, Eri, Francesca Di Garbo, Oona Raatikainen, Robert Forkel, Rosnátaly Avelino, Sacha Beck, Anna Berge, Ana Blanco Pena, Ross Bowden, Nicolás Brid, Joseph M. Brincat, María Belén Carpio, Alexander Cobbinah, Paola Cúneo, [...] Jill Vaughan, Georg Ziegelmeyer, Veronika Zikmundová, Ricardo Napoleão de Souza and Kaius Sinnemäki. 2025. A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities. Scientific Data 12. 1958. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06192-1

Ramadhani, Farah and Jill Vaughan. 2025. Investment dynamics of English learners at the grassroots in Bali’s tourism industry. English Today 41(3): 200-209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026607842510093X

Ma, Q., Su, X., Erni, J.N. & Xu, Z. 2025. Exploring transcultural translanguaging strategies in English literature of a bilingual Chinese author: a corpus-based study. Asian Englishes. 27(2), pp. 404-424

Xu, Zhichang. 2025. Editorial: Land acknowledgement in English across cultures. English Today 41(4). pp. 223-224

BOOK CHAPTERS

Biewer, Caroline & Kate Burridge 2025. English in Australasia and the South Pacific: Theoretical issues. In Kingsley Bolton (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, Chapter 119.

Burridge, Kate & Howard Manns 2025. Behind the lingo – slang and the dictionary. In: Idalete Dias, Rufus H. Gouws, Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann, Stefan J. Schierholz (eds) Regarding the Significance of Lexicography/Zur Bedeutsamkeit der Lexikographie: Europe and Australia/Europa und Australien.

Burridge, Kate & Isabelle Burke 2025. “Unspoken Words: Language and Taboo”; in the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd edition; pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00649-9

Ennever, Thomas & Alice Gaby. 2026. Non-verbal predication in Ngumpin-Yapa languages (Australia). 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. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Gaby, Alice. 2026. Yesterday’s eve: Patterns of polysemy among the deictic temporals of Australian languages. In Rita Brdar-Szabó & Mario Brdar (eds.), Thinking and speaking about time (Human Cognitive Processing: Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use). Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Iwasaki, S, Bartlett, M Manns, H and Willoughby, L. Sensorial Participation and Recipient Actions in Deafblind Signed Interactions (2026). In Communication with People who are Deafblind: Assessment and Intervention edited by Marleen J. Janssen, Timothy S. Hartshorne, Walter Wittich. Oxford University Press.

Xu, Zhichang 2025. Chinese Englishes. In Kingsley Bolton (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 765-777

Xu, Zhichang 2025. Worldliness of English in ELT Material and Curriculum Development: A Cultural Linguistics Approach. In Alemi, Minoo & Zia Tajeddin (eds.) Cultural Linguistics and ELT Curriculum. Singapore. Springer. p. 111-127

Book reviews

Peeters, W. (2026). A Theory of Applied Linguistics: Imagining and Disclosing the Meaning of Design, written by Albert Weideman. Philosophia Reformata, 1, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1163/23528230-bja10131

Gaby, Alice. 2025. Book Review of Verstraete, Jean-Christophe, 2024. A Dictionary of Morrobolam: A Lamalamic language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Te Reo, 68(1), 3–6.

PODCASTS

Lindgren, Mia, Helene Thomas, Kate Burridge Breaking Taboos: Older Australians talk about mental health (10 episodes — an outcome of the ARC-funded research Detabooing Depression (led by researchers from Monash University, Corvinius University of Budapest and the University of Tasmania) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506229

MASTERS COMPLETIONS

The impact of the use of AI Technologies (ChatGPT) on English Language Teacher Agency and Professional Autonomy: Balancing Human Judgment and Algorithmic Recommendations in Educational Settings. (Emma Morton) — Supervisor Ward Peeters

The semantic prosody of ‘Trumpism’ and how positive or negative prosody signifies the importance of media reporting and public discourse in the perception of a person, political movement, or ideology. (Gabrielle Haden) — Supervisor Satoshi Nambu

Teachers' Perceptions and Strategies Regarding Transitional Bilingual Education Policy in Indonesian Elementary School. (Andi Muammar Kareba) — Supervisor Julian Millie

PHD COMPLETIONS

“Colloquial Language in Victorian High Schools” (Dylan Hughes) — supervisors Howie Manns and Kate Burridge

Exploring the Long-term Motivation of Post-tertiary Multilingual Adult Learners of Chinese as an Additional Language (Xiaoli Li) — Supervisors Hui Huang and Ward Peeters

AWARDS

A/Prof Louisa Willoughby won the Community Champion award at the Universities Australia Shaping Australia award for her work Breaking barriers in communication: transforming access for Deaf and Deafblind Australians. This work was also written up in The Australian who sponsor the awards.

Prof Wang Lixun and Dr. Marc Xu won the Dean’s International Research Collaboration Award (Faculty of Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong, or EUHK) in the 2025/26 Academic Year. This award provides opportunities for academic staff of the Faculty of Humanities and their overseas colleagues to carry out research related academic exchange activities by visiting each other’s university for up to two weeks. Marc Xu visited the EUHK in January 2026, and Prof Wang Lixun will visit Monash in June 2026.

The podcast “Breaking Taboos: Older Australians talk about mental health” (see details above) has been short-listed in the Australian audio awards for two categories: Health and Wellbeing and Interview. We have fingers and toes crossed!

OTHER EXCITING NEWS

This semester saw the arrival of Tula Wynyard into the program, and we’re equally delighted that Carolin Schneider (currently at the University of Duisburg-Essen) will be joining us at the start of second semester. We’re thrilled to welcome both to the Monash team.

Kate Burridge

News from Macquarie University

Staff updates

Dr Rachael Unicomb has joined the Department as Associate Professor in Speech Pathology. Rachael’s research has focused on stuttering and speech sound disorders in childhood.

Prof Ingrid Piller has been successful with her application to be renewed as a Distinguished Professor.

Recently retired, Prof Katherine Demuth has been awarded the title of Distinguished Professor Emerita by the University.

Phonetics Lab Updates

Lee, Y-J., Proctor, M., Dras, M., Roger, P., Enriquez, V. Designing Data-Responsive Language Learning Environments through Conversation Practice with AI. MQ Data Horizons Research Centre 2025 Seeding Grant

Ballard, K., Szalay, T., Proctor, M., Foster, C., Gully, A., Ahmed, R.As we speak: Unmasking speech changes earlier in the course of disease. NHMRC Ideas Grant 2025-2028

Student Commencements

· Paul McQuire, commenced PhD Oct 2025 (Macquarie/NTHU cotutelle)

Vivienne Stolze, commenced PhD Dec 2025, IDEALAB (Macquarie/Groningen cotutelle)

Zhenyi Liao, commenced PhD Apl 2026 (Macquarie)

Book Chapters

Browne, Mitch, Alfred Presbitero, Sharlene Leroy-Dyer, Yuan Liao, Andre Pekerti, and Fara Azmat. “A Cultural Intelligence Mapping of Cross-Cultural Training Programs in the Context of First Peoples in Australia: Current State and Opportunities for Development.” In Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management, edited by Alfred Presbitero and Vasyl Taras. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035331048.00023.

Cox F. & Penney, J. (2025) Dynamic characteristics of PRICE and MOUTH in Multicultural Australian English, in Thomas, E. (ed)Immigrant Englishes around the World, Routledge, 40-63.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003401124

Cox, F. M. (2025) Australian English Phonetics and Phonology, in Burridge, K. (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes: Australasia and the Pacific, Wiley Blackwell, West Sussex, 1-13.

Journal Articles

Browne, M., Harvey, M., Proctor, M., & Mailhammer, R. (2026). Central vowels in Kamu and Larrakia.Australian Journal of Linguistics, 46(1), 138–158.

Clements, C., Penney, J. Gibson, A, Szakay, A & Cox, F. (2025) Phonological and lexical conditioning of TRAP vowel duration in Australian English, Journal of the International Phonetic Association DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100325000064

Penney, J., Ratko, L. & Cox, F. (2025). Electroglottographic analysis of coda voicelessness in Australian English, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. DOI: 10.1121/10.0038958

White, H., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Change in the prevalence of creaky voice over time in Australian English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters

Conference Papers

Alkhudidi, A., Holt, R., Szalay, T., Demuth, K., & Benders, T. (2025). The acquisition of plain–emphatic consonant contrasts by Arabic-speaking children: An acoustic study.Journal of Child Language, 1–29. PDF :: BIB :: DOI

Fan, Z., Kurniawan Ibrahim, R., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Creaky voice facilitates more efficient phonological processing of Mandarin Tone 3, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2025, Rotterdam. (pp. 1303–1307). 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1168

Piyadasa, T., Glaunès, J., Gully, A., Proctor, M., Ballard, K., Szalay, T., Sanaei, N., Foster, S., & Jin, C. (2025). Constrained LDDMM for Dynamic Vocal Tract Morphing: Integrating Volumetric and Real-Time MRI. In Proc. Interspeech, (pp. 968–972). Rotterdam: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

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 Proc. Interspeech, (pp. 3499–3503). Rotterdam: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

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 Proc. Interspeech, (pp. 3489–3493). Rotterdam: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

Szalay, T., Shahin, M., Sirojan, T., Nan, Z., Huang, R., Ballard, K., Ahmed, B. (2025) AusKidTalk: Using Strategic Data Collection and Out-of-Domain Tools to Semi-Automate Novel Corpora Annotation.Proceedings of the 26th INTERSPEECH Conference, 4268-4272.

White, H., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Variability in intervocalic /t/ and community diversity in Australian English, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2025, Rotterdam. Best theme paper award nominee

Zhang, X., Liu, D., Xiao, T., Xiao, C., Szalay, T., Shahin, M., Ahmed, B., Epps, J. (2025) Auto-Landmark: Acoustic Landmark Dataset and Open-Source Toolkit for Landmark Extraction. Proceedings of the 26th INTERSPEECH Conference, 4263-4267.

Conference Presentations

Clements, C., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Early evidence of real-time onset /l/ darkening in Australian English, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025

Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Achieving voicelessness: Effects of coda identity on voice quality in preceding vowels. Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025

Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Neither here nor there: Variation in diphthongisation of near and square in Australian English, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025

Tobin, E., White, H., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2025) Australian English children’s variable realisations of intervocalic /t/ as time goes by, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025

Penney, J., Herrero de Haro, A., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (2025) Towards an interactive linguistic atlas of Australian English, 8th Forum on Englishes in Australia, Monah University, November 2025.

Browne, M., Harvey, M., Proctor, M., & Mailhammer, R. (2025). Central vowels in Kamu and Larrakia, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025.

Browne, M., Proctor, M., Harvey, M., Simpson, J., Mailhammer, R., Carpenter, H., & Naijing, L. (2025). Phonetic correlates of stop oppositions in four Australian languages, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025.

Browne, M., Harvey, M., Proctor, M., & Mailhammer, R. (2025). Central vowels in Kamu and Larrakia, Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Conference Gold Coast, December 2025.

Child Language Lab

Journal articles

Demuth, K. (2026). The acquisition of noun class prefixes in Bantu languages. In T. Kupisch & N. Schiller (Eds.), Handbook of Gender and Classifiers, Oxford University Press.

Demuth, K., Matlosa, L., & Qala, T. (2026). Sesotho speech acquisition. McLeod, S. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World, Oxford University Press.

Xu Rattanasone, N., Brookman, R., Kalashnikova, M., Grant, K.-A., Burnham, D., & Demuth, K. (2026). Maternal input, not transient elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, predicts 2-year-olds' vocabulary development. Journal of Child Language, 53(1), 206–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000924000308

Abrahamse, R., Benders, T., Demuth, K., & Rattanasone, N. X. (2025). Investigating the effects of speaking rate on spoken language processing in children who are deaf and hard of hearing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 68(6), 2959–2977. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00108

Holt, R., Kung, C., Schmidt, E., & Demuth, K. (2026). Rapid integration of speaker accent during morphosyntactic processing. Brain and Language. vol. 273 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105673

Xu, F., Tang, P., Demuth, K., & Rattanasone, N. X. (2025). "Panda" or "Bear, cat": Mandarin-speaking preschoolers use duration and pitch to distinguish compounds and lists. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000925000194

Hosted Events:

11 Dec 2025 – Beyond Speech Workshop: Language and Neurodiversity in Children and Yong People who are Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (Co-hosted with NextSense, The Shepherd Centre and Parents of Deaf Children)

PhD Completions

Feng Xu (2026). The Acquisition of Prosodic Cues to Meaning by Mandarin-speaking Children with Cochlear Implants (Supervisors: Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ping Tang & Katherine Demuth)

Muhammad Nafis Bin Azman (2025). English Medium Instruction from National Policies to Classroom Practices: A Case Study of a Secondary School in Malaysia (Supervisors: Alice Chik, Nan Xu Rattanasone, & Agi Bodis)

Congratulations to Feng and Nafis

Welcome to our new PhD and undergraduate intern students

Qianxi Jessi Yu (PhD Candidate), funded by a joint MQ-National Acoustics Laboratory Industry Scholarship to explore early behavioural and neuro indicators of typical and atypical language development in children with hearing loss

Kayla Josephine Wibowo (undergraduate intern), BA Psychological Sciences

Joe Blythe

News from the University of Western Australia

University of Oxford visiting fellowship

Celeste Rodríguez Louro spent Hilary Term 2026 (January-March) at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2025/august/lawyer-and-linguist-awarded-prestigious-fellowships.

During her time there, she delivered a series of invited talks and keynote presentations on the sociolinguistics of Aboriginal English and the implications of generative AI, including a keynote for the Oxford AI Society and presentations to the All Souls College Visiting Fellows’ Colloquium and the Department of Linguistics seminar series. She also contributed to global policy discussions through a UNESCO stakeholder consultation on AI governance, while advancing her research on voice technologies and linguistic equity through her project with Google. Her work also appeared on the BBC and The Times of India. With Miriam Meyerhoff, she co-organised the interdisciplinary workshop Decolonial perspectives across disciplines: Data, research and teaching, strengthening collaborations across fields and institutions. Her time in Oxford consolidated her international research profile at the intersection of sociolinguistics, decolonisation, and responsible AI, while progressing a suite of high-impact outputs in 2026.

New PhD candidate

Welcome to our newest PhD candidate Jordan Loch Hill! Supported by a University Postgraduate Award, the project is co-supervised by Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Nin Kirkham (Philosophy) and Wei Liu (Computer Science), reflecting its interdisciplinary focus across linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

PhD candidate updates

PhD candidate Lucía Fraiese is preparing to submit her thesis titled ‘Outta Country: Indigenous youth identities at an Australian boarding school’. The four papers that make up her thesis have recently been published in various internationally recognised outlets, such as the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Sociolinguistics, English World-Wide and Australian Journal of Linguistics. In February 2026, Lucía travelled to the University of Oxford to visit her supervisor, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, and to present at the Decolonial Perspectives symposium, organised by Celeste and Miriam Meyerhoff at All Souls College. Her participation was funded by a generous travel award from the UWA Data Institute.

PhD Candidate Alex Stephenson is currently writing up his thesis exploring the post-digitisation future of three Aboriginal language centre collections in Western Australia. In December 2025, Alex presented at the second Digitisation Centre of Western Australia Symposium at the State Library of Western Australia, with a presentation titled ‘Connecting across time: Digitisation and the language revitalisation journey’. Alex will continue writing throughout 2026 with planned visits to language centres to discuss thesis results.

In November 2025, PhD candidate Katharina Froedrich presented ‘Sociolinguistic fieldwork: collecting Aboriginal English data in the Pilbara’ at the Forrest Research Foundation in Perth, and in December 2025, she co-presented ‘Working together in the Pilbara: PhD internships as springboards for meaningful collaboration in sociolinguistics’ at ALS 2025, together with Breanna Kelly, linguist and community language specialist at PKKP Aboriginal Corporation. From mid-January to late February, she was on a research visit in Germany and the UK, where she presented her PhD project at the University of Cologne, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. At the University of Munich, she gave an invited guest lecture titled ‘Australian Aboriginal English(es): Case studies from the Pilbara and Croker Island’ together with PhD candidate Sarah Potye. Katharina also joined her principal supervisor Celeste Rodríguez Louro at All Souls College where she had the opportunity to meet influential contemporary sociolinguists and attend an inspiring symposium organised by Celeste and Miriam Meyerhoff and titled Decolonial perspectives across disciplines: Data, research and teaching. Katharina is currently finalising her data collection. She has also had a co-authored paper on general extenders in Aboriginal English accepted for presentation at the 2026 DiPVaC conference in Salzburg, Austria later this year.

Postdoctoral researchers

Madeleine Clews is continuing to work on creating the Corpus of Historical Australian English (CHAusE) from ego-documents written by speakers born in Australia in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She has recently completed fieldwork collecting further data from archives in Tasmania, New South Wales and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, funded by the English Speaking Union (Victoria Branch), and is now working on cataloguing and transcribing many hundreds of letters and diaries with expert assistance from staff of Language Data Commons of Australia. She has just been advised that the English Speaking Union has awarded her further funding in the form of the Oldham Wedlick Scholarship and a Minor Project Grant which will support CHAusE in 2026 and 2027. She is looking forward to giving presentations at the forthcoming Methods in Dialectology and Language Diversity XIX conference in Vancouver and the Historical Sociolinguistics Network conference in August and September respectively.

Staff updates

The 2026 Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) has just finished, with Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway serving as the WA chair and as part of the problem selection committee. WA was well-represented nationally, with teams scoring very well in rounds 1 and 2.

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 was in Western Australia from December 1, 2025 until early February 2026. During her visit she met with collaborators, made progress on several projects and visited the Northern Territory.

Publications

Fraiese, Lucía (2025). First Nations women in an Indigenous boarding school: A sociolinguistic ethnography. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 35(3): e70030.

Fraiese, Lucía, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Matt Hunt Gardner, Glenys Dale Collard and James A. Walker. (2025). Freakin’ swimming and everything: school practices and variable (ING) in an Australian Indigenous boarding school. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 30 (1): 15–28.

Fraiese, Lucía, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Matt Hunt Gardner and Glenys Dale Collard. (2026). We was goin’ kangaroo shooting: was/were variation in Aboriginal English. English World-Wide.

Fraiese, Lucía (2026). The Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English. Australian Journal of Linguistics. 46(3). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07268602.2026.2628825

Kruk, Jess. (2026). Interlocutor reference and competing social imaginaries in a predominantly Chinese Indonesian workplace in West Kalimantan. Language and Communication, 107, 23–36.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste (2026). In a world of AI text, speech still reigns supreme. The Conversation.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste (2026). It takes a village: The collective nature of human intelligence. The Times of India.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Jennifer Rodger (2026). Why comparisons between AI and human intelligence miss the point. The Conversation.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste, Glenys Collard, Hope Narrier, Katrina Cox, Lily Hayward, Daniel Colbung and Ben Hutchinson. 2026. ‘I have to talk proper white ways’: Australian Aboriginal English Speakers’ Experiences with voice technologies. In Proceedings of ACM CHI, Barcelona, Spain.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste, Glenys Collard and Ben Hutchinson. 2025. ‘You gotta act white’: How voice recognition tech fails for Aboriginal English speakers. The Conversation.

Grants

Dr Luisa Miceli (Lead CI), Dr Emilie Dotte-Sarout (UWA Archaeology), Dr Chae Byrne (UWA Archaeology), Dr Maïa Ponsonnet and Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre have been successful in two grant applications that will support a project titled Foyer and Garla: using language to re-centre Indigenous perspectives in Archaeology. Honours student Mary Hynes has also joined the research team. The grants are as follows:

Embassy of France in Australia, Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and France Grant Scheme (AUD 5,000)

School of Social Sciences Grant Scheme (Major Grant-Seeding Fund) (AUD 5,000)

Invited keynotes and talks

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. Questions on the global nature of AI. UNESCO consultation (March 2026)

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. Hearing the voices: Decolonising sociolinguistics. All Souls College Visiting Fellows’ colloquium, University of Oxford (March 2026).

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. Beyond the calculator analogy: Engaging critically with GenAI. Oxford AI Society keynote (March 2026).

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. Hearing the voices: Towards a relational framework. General Linguistics seminar series, University of Oxford (February 2026).

Selected presentations

Fraiese, Lucía. TALK WHITER: First Nations girls’ resistance to colonial pressures in boarding school.

Invited presentation at Decolonial perspectives across disciplines: Data, research and teaching. All Souls College, University of Oxford, 26 February 2026.

Kruk, Jess and Luisa Miceli. Taking EngLang out West: The Case for Introducing English Language (Linguistics) into WA High Schools. Paper presented at the 2025 Conference of the ALS. Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. Working together: Sociolinguistic research in urban Aboriginal Australia.

Invited presentation at Decolonial perspectives across disciplines: Data, research and teaching. All Souls College, University of Oxford, 26 February 2026.

Media

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste

BBC World Service – The Inquiry

Will there ever be one global language?

25 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 later this year.

Our website is slowly taking shape and keynote speakers have recently been announced! Have a look here:

https://als.asn.au/Conference/2026/Plenaries2026

Dates of interest:

Masterclasses and themed sessions

Deadline 1 May 2026

Conference abstracts

Deadline: 26 June 2026

Registrations open 1 August 2026

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

News from RMIT

Recent publications

Fukuno, Maho. (2026). Humanising translator ethics: Unpacking the black box of translation practice. Routledge.

Fukuno, Maho, Gonzalez Garcia, Erika, Norma, Caroline, & Yoshida, Rika. (2025). Beyond policy transfer: cultural hybridisation in multicultural disaster communication. Policy Design and Practice, 9(1), 124–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2025.2570953

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

Arab, Reza and Mullan, Kerry. (2025). Having Fun is a Matter of Taste: ‘Funny’ Words in French and Persian. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan & Cliff Goddard (eds.). Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures, and Global Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 289-307.

Peeters, Bert†, Sadow, Lauren, Goddard, Cliff & Mullan, Kerry. (2025). Language, culture, and values: six ways to see them more clearly. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan & Cliff Goddard (eds.). Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures, and Global Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 9-36.

Peeters, Bert†, Sadow, Lauren, Goddard, Cliff & Mullan, Kerry. (2025). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Underlying Philosophy and Basic Principles. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan & Cliff Goddard (eds.). Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures, and Global Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 37-64.

Mullan, Kerry. (2025). #staystrongmelbs: Collective Identity Unleashed by an Earthquake. Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics 11(1), 155-178. Special issue: Humor as resemiotization.

Conference presentations

Mullan, Kerry with Biewer, Carolin. 2026. Non-seriousness in Ukrainian war-time Tweets – a reflection on how Geolingual Studies and Humour Studies could work together. Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference, Victoria University Wellington, February.

HDR completions/milestones

The following students successfully passed their progress milestones in February 2026:

Brunetti, Edoardo. Thesis title: 'Regional' languages of France: perspectives from the grassroots. (Third milestone)

Supervisors: Kerry Mullan and Alexis Bergantz

Alsulami, Budur. Thesis title: The Saudi Arabia 2030 Strategy: translation reception and translator readiness

Supervisors: Kerry Mullan, Erika Gonzalez Garcia and Maho Fukuno

Kerry Mullan

News from the University of Sydney

Recent PhD thesis completions:

Samuel Herriman, Aboriginal English and Australian First Languages in television dialogue: from screenwriters to audiences (Supervisors: Monika Bednarek, Jaky Troy)

Markos Koumoulos. The ancient voice of the future: reawakening Wamin song and language through the didjeridu. (Supervised by Myf Turpin & Linda Barwick).

Jodie Kell. The Ripple Effect of the First All-Women’s Band from West Arnhem Land. (Supervised by Myf Turpin & Linda Barwick).

Jacinta Tobin. Ngurra Barayagai (Song Belonging to Country) (Supervised by Jaky Troy and Amanda Harris) https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/33839

Mujahid Torwali. An Ethnolinguistic Analysis and a Sketch Grammar of Torwali Language: An Approach to Support Mother Tongue Education in Swat Valley, Pakistan(Supervised by Jaky Troy and Michael Walsh)

Janette Thambyrajah. An analysis and survey of Australian Aboriginal children's books containing heritage language (supervised by Jaky Troy and Michael Walsh)

Staff news

Jakelin Troy and Mujahid Torwali convened the annual Australex conference and AGM in conjunction with the annual ALS conference at the University of the Gold Coast. In addition, Jakelin Troy and Mujahid Torwali presented their paper titled “The Missing Goal: Indigenist Linguistics and the Sustainable Future of Torwali Language and Cultural Identity” at the 29th Annual Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL XXIX 2025), held from 22–25 October 2025.

Mujahid Torwali was interviewed for ABC Radio National, discussing the Torwali language of Swat, North Pakistan: Roots and Rhythms of Languages: Torwali, the language of Pakistan's Swat Valley

The Sydney Corpus Lab recently published a post containing a synthesis of how large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools have been incorporated into corpus linguistic research. shorter follow-up post on the same topic can be used as a teaching resource.

Monika Bednarek published the following:

Bednarek, Monika, Carly Bray, Tara Coltman-Patel and Catriona Bonfiglioli (2026) Examining the uptake of media guidelines: A corpus analysis of obesity representation in Australian and UK news. In G. Brookes, N. Curry, & R. Love (eds) Applications of Corpus Linguistics. Established and Emergent Contexts. Cambridge University Press: 196-232.

Caple, Helen & Monika Bednarek (2026) Exploring corpora through seed term visualisation and metadata analysis: A case study of a newspaper corpus covering violence against women. In L. Mercé & S. Maruenda-Bataller (eds) Discourse Approaches to Gender-based Violence: Deconstructing Social Inequality through Linguistic Inquiry. De Gruyter Mouton: 135-160.

Sunny-Boy Brumby Ahmar Mahboob published the following:

‘No stars: Nothing to guide me’: Paving Our Destiny by Learning from the Land and Creating Alternative Practices. In A. Sherris & J. Peyton (eds.), Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and Scholarship (pp. 113–133). Multilingual Matters.

Part I of The Epic Folly (Parts I–III) (Parts II–III linked on the page)

Socio-semiotic Violence and the ‘Population Explosion’

Myf Turpin in collaboration with Batchelor Institute, T Vincent, and A Pope created a board game for Kaytetye subsection, kin terms, place names and Dreamings. Called ‘Ikwe’, it can be borrowed from Batchelor Institute library. For more information scroll to bottom of kaytetye.com.au.

Myf published the following:

Turpin, M. 2025. The Moon Travels East. In O’Shannessy, C., J. Gray & D. Angelo (eds) Projecting Voices: Studies in language and linguistics in honour of Jane Simpson. pp959–981, Asia-Pacific Linguistics, ANU Press.

Curran, G., Turpin, M & P. L. Ford. 2025. Ecomusicology, performance and environmental crises: Nurturing human relationships with the environment. world of music (new series) 14(2).

Turpin, M & Ward, M. 2025. Ceremony and sentient ecology. world of music (new series) 14(2). December 2025, M Turpin & M Ward.

Nick Enfield returned in January from sabbatical leave (spent mostly in the Netherlands) where he completed a book titled Life Cycles of Language now in production with MIT Press.

Nick recently published the following:

Enfield, N. J. (2026). The Enchronic Envelope. Psychological Review. (2), 296–314. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000553

Enfield, N. J. (2025). Legibility in culture. Anthropological Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996251338486

Enfield, N. J. (2026). Legibility and agency. American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70041

Enfield, N. J. (2026). Multimodality’s role in nano-scale niche construction. Gesture. https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.25029.enf

Nick received a Digital Future Initiative Grant from Google Australia for research on “Adaptation and repair in real-time conversational AI evaluation”.

Nick’s recently-awarded ARC Discovery grant “Reason-giving in the wild” will start in July.

Nick Enfield

News from La Trobe University

The Linguistics Program at La Trobe University is delighted to report two recent successful PhD examinations:

Dr Jinguyan (Claire) Ye. Variation and Conventionalisation: Rhotacization in Beijing Dialect. (supervision: James Walker, David Bradley, Lauren Gawne)

Dr Joshua Butler. A Grammar of Middle Cornish. (supervision: Stephen Morey, Lauren Gawne)

Lauren Gawne

News from Griffith University

GENERAL

Linguistics at Griffith is a busy scene. Our refreshed Bachelor of Languages and Linguistics (B Lang Ling) is doing well, with some exciting new courses on offer. Aside from staff in linguistics, applied linguistics and TESOL, we have Matthew Callaghan in Spanish, and Helen Bromhead, Alena Kazmaly and Karen Stollznow as Adjunct Research Fellows. The Linguistics community also includes Danielle Heinrichs Henry and Kelly Shoecroft.

HDR NEWS

Nguyen Luong commenced her PhD in Linguistics on a topic in language documentation, supervised by Sam Rarrick and Cliff Goddard.

Stephanie Mašková submitted her PhD thesis in January, titled “The postcolonial semantics of Arctic Danish in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland): Places and place-based engagements”. Congratulations to Steph, who is now back in her native Denmark.

BOOKS

Sadow, Lauren, Kerry Mullan and Cliff Goddard (Eds). (2025). Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-81681-9 (eBook) | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-81681-9

SPECIAL ISSUES

Schuring, Melissa and Kelly Shoecraft (Eds). (2025). Many roles, many languages: Emergent multilingualism in children’s role play. Special Issue of International Journal of Play. | https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rijp20/14/3

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS

Goddard, Cliff and Vanhatalo, Ulla. (2026). “Day” and “night” in the high north: The changing rhythms of light and life in Finland. In Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye (Eds), Conceptualizing the Environment. Special issue of International Journal of Language & Culture, 12(1). [online publication 31-03-2026 | https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00075.god]

Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. (2025). Anchoring anthropological categories in simple, translatable words: The case of ‘art’ and ‘religion’. Current Anthropology 66(6), 791-816. | https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/739001

Mašková, Stephanie (2026). “Half of our lives is about ice”: A postcolonial semantic study of ice place terms in Arctic Danish”. In Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye (Eds), Conceptualizing the Environment. Special issue of International Journal of Language & Culture. | https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00076.mas

Schuring, Melissa & Shoecraft, Kelly. (2025). Children's multilingual role play: a synthesis of current insights on role construction, role comparison and role reality. International Journal of Play 14(3), s270-284 | https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2025.2535123

BOOK CHAPTERS

Fenton-Smith, Ben, Humphreys, Pamela, and Walkinshaw, Ian. (2025). EMI: English-medium internationalisation in Asian Hhigher education. In Romanowski, P. (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Multilingual Education. Cambridge University Press.

Fenton-Smith, Ben, Zhou, J., and Galloway, N. (2026). Unpacking the English Medium Instruction (EMI) boom: exploring student enrolment and driving forces in China and Japan. Research Papers in Education, 1-25.

Goddard, Cliff, Anna Gladkova and Zhengdao Ye. (2026). Ethnopragmatics (NSM approach). In Hans-Georg Wolf & Frank Polzenhagen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture, 2nd edition, pp95-110. Routledge. | doi: 10.4324/9781003363354-9

Goddard, Cliff, Helen Bromhead, Ida 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 Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan, and Cliff Goddard (Eds.). Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives (pp. 67-86). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mullan, Kerry, Lauren Sadow, and Cliff Goddard. (2025). An invitation to Applied Ethnolinguistics. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan and Cliff Goddard (Eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives (pp.1-8). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peeters, Bert, Lauren Sadow, Cliff Goddard and Kerry Mullan. (2025). Language, culture, and values: Six ways to see them more clearly. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan and Cliff Goddard (Eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives (pp. 9-36). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peeters, Bert, Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan and Cliff Goddard. (2025). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Underlying philosophy and basic principles. In Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan and Cliff Goddard (Eds.), Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Words, Cultures and Global Perspectives (pp. 37-64). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Louise and Hu, Mingyan. (2025). How EAL teachers harness a bespoke artificial intelligence tool to achieve personalised learning: A qualitative classroom-based study. TESOL in Context, 34(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.21153/tesol2025vol34no1art2155

ALS 2025 MASTERCLASS

Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye. (2025). Systematic Lexical Semantic Analysis (SaLSA). Half-day Masterclass at Annual Conference of Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), Griffith University, Gold Coast. 2 December 2025.

ALS 2025 CONFERENCE PAPERS

All presented at the Annual Conference of Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) (3-5 December 2025), Griffith University, Gold Coast.

Bergamaschi, Lissara. (2025). The language of water and weather: Rain related expressions in Aboriginal languages of Central East Queensland.

Docherty, Gerry and Paul Foulkes. (2025). Allophonic variation of /ə/ in the conversational speech of young speakers from Perth.

Gnevsheva, Ksenia, Catherine Travis, and Gerry Docherty. 2025. What it means to be a local: The role of local attachment in vowel realisations in regional Australia.

Goddard, Cliff. (2025). The lexical semantics of “play” and “sing” in cross-linguistic perspective.

Kazmaly, Alena. (2025). The language of measurement: The hidden role of lexical semantics in psychological testing (a case study of Russian and English words for Conscientiousness).

Luong, Nguyen H.T. (2025). The functions of Bipi (Austronesian, PNG) grammatical markers le- and la-.

Rarrick, Samantha, Candace Kruger and Julie Robert. (2025). Beginning the work: Recognition of prior Learning for Indigenous Languages in undergraduate Linguistics.

Wood, Bronwyn, Catherine Travis and Gerry Docherty. (2025). Sounding Au[str]alian: Retraction of (str) across real and apparent time in spontaneous speech.

PUBLIC WRITING

Karen Stollznow continues to write for Psychology Today, The Conversation, and to appear regularly on the Monster Talk podcast. Advance orders are open for her coming book Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language (CUP).

Cliff Goddard

News from the Australian National University (ANU)

Awards

Distinguished Professor Nicholas Evans, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), has been awarded one of the highest prizes in linguistics –the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics. Read about Nick’s story here: Through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages

Laura Arnold, Firebird Foundation (US$9,877.59). Project title: ‘Creating the first record of Wate oral literature’.

Daniella Haber, Firebird Foundation (US$8,871). Project title: ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge through the Rembarrnga language’.

Yuchen Li, Firebird Foundation (US$8200). Project title: ‘From ceremony to cultivation: Safeguarding Angkola-Mandailing oral literature and traditional ecological knowledge’.

Arnaud, Isabelle. University medal, Linguistics/Languages, First class Honours (thesis on Romance linguistics supervised by Manuel Delicado Cantero).

HDR News

New PhD students:

Michael Jossefson (primary supervisor: Beth Evans): Michael’s PhD project is focused on the documentation and description of the Oriomo language Wipi spoken in southern New Guinea. This project builds on his Honours research that resulted in a fine-grained diachronic study of the Oriomo languages.

Anastassiya Kolesnichenko (primary supervisor: Laura Arnold): Anastassiya has recently completed a fieldwork-based Master’s degree at the Université Paris Cité, where she produced a sketch grammar of Tshodrug Tibetan. In her PhD project she will turn her attention to northwest New Guinea, and plans to document and describe Barapasi, a language of the near-completely unknown East Cenderawasih Bay (aka Geelvink Bay) family.

I Komang Sumaryana Putra (primary supervisor: Darja Hoenigman): Komang’s PhD project investigates ritual language, identity, and multilingualism in contemporary Bali. His focus on inter-caste and interfaith marriages offers critical insights into linguistic and cultural resilience amid rapid social change on the island within the broader context of modern Indonesia.

PhD Completion:

Congratulations to Haoyi Li on the award of PhD for her thesis

Li, Haoyi. 2026. "How Yolŋu talk about art: Aspects of narratives, metaphors and colour terms from the Ganalbiŋu (Western Yolŋu) perspective." DOI 10.25911/1083-CD23 URL https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733806987

This thesis examines intersections between the language and art practices of the Ganalbingu clan (Western Yolŋu) based on eight months of fieldwork in Ramingining and Gapuwiyak, North Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia. By studying the discourse around traditional paintings and fibre art of Western Yolŋu communities, or how Yolŋu talk about art, this thesis investigates aspects of the form and content of narratives about paintings; linguistic and conceptual metaphors; and the semantics of colour terms and aesthetics. This analysis in turn sheds light on Yolŋu worldviews, cultural values and pedagogical processes, triangulating between language and art.

Haoyi is taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne on the ARC Industry Laureate Project "Effecting Solutions for Risk to Remote Indigenous Heritage".

Conferences/Symposia:

The Congreso-colloquium La diversidad lingüística de España/ The linguistic diversity of Spain was held on 20 February, 2026: https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/events/la-diversidad-linguistica-de-espanathe-linguistic-diversity-spain-congresocolloquium The International Symposium was organised by AILASA (Manuel Delicado Cantero, Fabricio Tocco and Thomas Nulley-Valdés) and partially funded by an HISPANEX grant awarded to Manuel Delicado Cantero by the Ministry of Culture, Government of Spain.

Workshop on the Languages of Papua 7, Ternate (Indonesia), on 13–14 January 2026/ Organised by Laura Arnold, David Gil, and Antoinette Schapper.

ANU LDaCA update

Over last year, the ANU LDaCA team ran a project on Identifying Precarious Victorian Oral History Collections, led by Anisa Puri. The project had enormous buy-in, and between May and September 2025, it received close to 200 submissions reporting on over 9000 interviews! The project report and searchable database about the collections are now available online, and can be accessed on the website:

Final Report:

https://precariousoralhistories.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IPVOH_Report_Final.pdf

Project database: https://precariousoralhistories.com/project-database/

We are now replicating the project in NSW and the ACT, and oral historian Alex Mountain has recently taken up a position at ANU to lead that, and to work towards greater discoverability, accessibility and sustainability of oral history collections.

Publications

Arka, I Wayan. 2025. "Language documentation and the multi-dimensionality of capacity building: framing research diversity in an Indonesian ethno-ecological context." In Projecting Voices: Essays in language and linguistics in honour of Jane Simpson, edited by C O'Shannessy, J Gray and D Angelo, 1047-1071. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.

Arka, I Wayan. 2026. "Diversifying Science: Insights of Native- and Non-Native-Speaker Collaborations in Linguistic Descriptions." In The Documentarist Turn – From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations, edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Rein hl and Hellwig Birgit, 75-106. Amsterdam: John Benjamin

Arnold, Laura. 2026. Sketch grammars of Wauyai Ma ˈ ya and Batta: Two undocumented languages of Raja Ampat, northwest New Guinea. Language Documentation & Conservation 20: 1 – 51, hdl.handle.net/10125/74842.

Saad, George, Laura Arnold & Emma Peddie. 2025. Late Vernacular Production in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Glossa Contact 1(1): 1–54, doi:10.82012/glossa.contact.2025.saad.et.al. Chien, L., Dahm, M., Morris, J (2025) Diagnostic error is prevalent, harmful and costly - Australia must take diagnostic safety seriously. MJA Insight+, 24 November 2025.

Barth, Danielle, Laura Arnold, Kira Davey, Caroline Hendy, Saurabh Nath, Keira Mullan, and Sam Passmore. 2026. Talk across the Pacific: Developments in understanding traditional and modern multilingualism. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, doi:10.1075/aplv.00023.bar.

Barth, Danielle & Schnell, Stefan. (2026). Corpus Typology in Reference Module in Social Sciences. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.01535-0

Bou Orm, Heba. 2026. Attitudes in context: Stereotypes in patterns of ethnic identification in Sydney. Australian Journal of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2026.2627221

Delicado Cantero, Manuel and Julia Pozas Loyo. 2026. “The diachrony of Spanish otro”. In Patr cia Amaral (ed.), Other: Ambiguity, Constraints, and Change, Leiden: Brill, 160-194. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004744196_007

Evans, Nicholas & Manuel Pamkal. 2026. From the audible to the meaningful: the role of listener/speakers in making sense of 60 years of Dalabon recordings. In Sonja Riesberg, Uta Rein hl & Birgit Hellwig (eds.), The Empirical Turn –From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 109-125.

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. Experiencer objects in Nen (Yam, Papuan). 2025. In Carmel O'Shannessy, James Gray & Denise Angelo (eds.) Projecting Voices: Studies in language and linguistics in honour of Jane Simpson. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 21-48.

Evans, Nicholas, Danielle Barth, Wayan Arka, Henrik Bergqvist, Christian Dhler, Sonja Gipper, Yukinori Kimoto, Dominique Knuchel, Daniel Majchrzak, Hitomi Ō no, Eka Pratiwi, Saskia van Putten, Andrea C. Schalley, Asako Shiohara, Stefan Schnell & Yanti. 2025. Is complementation a universal strategy? A cross-linguistic corpus study. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 5.2: 66-104. doi.org/10.60923/issn.2785-0943/21288

Gnevsheva, Ksenia & Carmel O’Shannessy. 2026. English language attitudes in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.25071.gne

Keith, Emma and I Wayan Arka. 2025. “Pronominal agreement and the changing face of Austronesian voice: The view from Sipora Mentawai”. In Proceedings of the LFG’25 Conference, eds. Miriam Butt, Jamie Y Findlay, and Ida Toivonen, 154-177. Konstanz: Publikon.

Morett, L. M. & Inceoglu, S. (Eds.) (2026). Gesture in second language acquisition and pedagogy. De Gruyter Brill.

O’Shannessy, Carmel, James Gray, and Denise Angelo, eds. Projecting Voices: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson. ANU Press, 2025. There was a book launch celebration at ANU and online on February 27.

Passmore, Sam, Lila San Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, Saurabh Nath, Kira Davey, Keira Mullan, Tim Cawley, Jennifer Biggs, Rosey Billington, Bethwyn Evans, Nick Thieberger, Nicholas Evans and Danielle Barth. 2025. English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two English-based Pacific Creoles. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31172–31183, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Ye, Zengdao. 2025. The Ethnolinguistics of Stranger and Acquaintance in English. In: Sadow, L., Mullan, K., Goddard, C. (eds) Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 269-286.

Ye, Zhengdao and Cliff Goddard (2026). Conceptualizing the environment: Words as cultural lenses for seeing the world. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1-16 https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00074.ye

Ye, Zhengdao and Emma Xu Rao (2026). Landscape and/in ethnonational concepts in Chinese: The cultural keywords héshān 河山 and jiānghú 江湖. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1-19 https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00077.ye

Conference Presentations

Chien, L., Morris, J., Lawless, A., Crock, C., Scanlan, S., Dahm, M. (2025) Communicating diagnostic uncertainty in emergency care (Poster) IHI-BMJ International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare 19-21 November 2025, Canberra, Australia.

Dahm, M., Morris, J., Chien, L. (2025) Embracing the unknown: Communicating uncertainty to enhance diagnostic excellence. Monash Medical School Improving Diagnosis Symposium, 15 December 2025, Monash University, Clayton, Australia.

Wayan Arka and Zhengdao Ye

Jawun Research Institute (Central Queensland University)

Staff news

Prof Alexandra Aikhenvald was reappointed as Oxford English Dictionary (OED) consultant (South American Indian languages) for another five years and has checked several entries throughout 2026. She spent a week in February in Brussels, in her capacity as a member of the European Research Council Panel SH4 ‘The human mind and its complexity’ for 2025-2026, and will continue performing her duties throughout this year. Her new monograph Noun categorization: a comprehensive typology was published in January 2026. Her comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea, in typological perspective (c. 200,000 words), was accepted for publication by Oxford University Press, and should be published later this year. She is working on a number of papers on evidentials, a monograph provisionally entitled Versatile morphology: person marking and affixation in Arawak languages, and a historically-oriented grammar of Baré, an Arawak language from north-west Amazonia . Jointly with Dr Gülshen Sakhatova (University of Cyprus, Nicosia), she is preparing an edited volume Evidentiality and the supranatural across languages and cultures (Oxford University Press) for publication. 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’, jointly with R. M. W. Dixon.

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). A selection of teaching materials for the Tariana language is available here. The materials are in use in the Tariana school Enu Irine Idakine (Children of Blood of Thunder) in Iauaretê (Amazonas, Brazil) with Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald as the consultant in linguistics. She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. 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).

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is continuing research on his copious collection of fieldwork materials, gathered when he was younger. These encompass Dyirbal language (with dialects Girramay, Jirrbal, Ngajan, and Mamu), ad Yidiñ of North Queensland; the Boumaa dialect of Fijian, and Jarawara language from southern Amazonia. He is also continuing work on English grammar.

Since his teens, Bob has worked on discography of African-American music. He was co-compiler of the 1963 book Blues and Gospel records 1902-1942 (765 pp.) The fifth edition of this compilation, now called Blues and Gospel recordings 1890-1943 (c. 1500 pp), is being produced by University of Mississippi Press in September 2026.

He will have a short book published by Lincom entitled ‘Australian comparative linguistics: an evaluation’. He continues his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendants of the Yidinji speakers, providing information and advice on introducing original Dyirbal language concepts and terminology within the framework of Indigenous Engagement and First Nations Research at CQUniversity, as a priority within the Jawun Research institute. 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 Françoise Daquin, an expert in French history and literature, continues her work on French settlers in Queensland.

Dr Christoph Holz is continuing the documentation of Konomala, an Oceanic language of southern New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. In June 2025, he was awarded an Endangered Language Fund: Language Legacies Grant, jointly with Lidia Mazzitelli, for the “Konomala and Lavatbura-Lamasong book project” (USD 3,035), with the aim to produce bilingual books for schools in Papua New Guinea. One of the outcomes is Órsa: Konomala Story Book, a collection of 91 stories, riddles, poems, and songs recorded in the Konomala area. Now he is preparing a dictionary and grammar of Konomala.

Between May and September 2025, Christoph collaborated with Uta Kornmeier of the Humboldt Forum Berlin in the project “Originalsprachliche Begriffe erlebbar machen”. During his fieldwork between May and July 2025, he showed and discussed photos of objects of the Ethnological Museum Berlin with their communities of origin in southern New Ireland. The aim was to restore the names and stories of previously nameless objects in the museum and to make the photos and information available to the communities of origin.

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, is currently Associate Head of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Beijing Normal University. His research focuses on linguistic typology, Austronesian languages, and the interface between language, society, and cognition. He is currently supervising six PhD students and two MA students, each working on grammatical topics ranging from cross-linguistic comparison to theoretically-informed description of previously under-described languages. His recent work centers on proper names, evidentiality, and typological features of Austronesian languages, including a special issue on “Proper Names” in Asian Languages and Linguistics and several studies on classifiers, toponymy, and grammatical systems.

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.

Wenqi Li, a PhD scholar, Shenzhen University (Shenzhen, Guangdong, PRC) has been appointed as a Visiting Research Student to undertake research activities in the Jawun Research Institute from 30/01/2026 to 29/01/2027, under the supervision of Professors Alexandra Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon, to work on his PhD ‘Relative clauses in Yunnan minority languages’. He is currently undertaking field research on a number of languages, while awaiting a visa to come to Jawun.

Craig Alan Volker is Professor and Associate member of the Jawun Research Institute. From September 2025 to present, he has been continuing to compile a dictionary of the Nalik language of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea together with maimais (clan leaders), eitaks (carvers), clan matriarchs, and other community leaders in New Ireland. During this time, besides hosting well-attended weekly community dictionary evenings at his home in Madina Village in the Northeast dialect area, he began holding weekly meetings in Fatmilak Village in the Southeast dialect area.

He has begun to format the dictionary that will be published initially online as a Pressbook publication in collaboration with the James Cook University Library. At the moment he is learning how to transfer his data from the TLex lexicography software he is using to the Pressbook platform. The work in progress is available for community comment here.

During this time he has continued to publish monthly articles about language and linguistics in The National, one of the two daily newspapers in Papua New Guinea. His presentations are:

18 September 2025. Keynote address, 2025 Conference of the Linguistic Society of PNG at the University of Goroka, Papua New Guinea “Language crossroads at the half-century mark: Standards, identity, and multilingual complexity”

5 November 2025. Jawun Research Institute Seminar Series “Urban Lagiri: One man’s community initiative to teach language and culture in a Papua New Guinea primary school”

13 November 2025. University of North Dakota, USA (online) “Doing linguistics in Papua New Guinea”

23 February 2026. Universitas Internasional Papua, Jayapura, Indonesia (online) “Vernacular Education in Melanesia: Integrating Indigenous Wisdom into School Curricula”

Dr Michael Wood has been reappointed as Adjunct Professor at Jawun Research Institute (for another 3 years). He continues working on anthropological and linguistic topics dealing with land ownership and other issues of the Kamula of Western Province.

New publications by members of the cluster (a selection)

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2026. Noun categorization: a comprehensive typology. Munich: Lincom Europa (694 pp+xxiii)

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2026. ‘Gender’. International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2026. Noun classes and classifiers: semantics’. Updated edition, Editor(s): Keith Brown, Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), Elsevier, Pages 463-471.

Dixon, R. M. W. 2026. Australian comparative linguistics: an evaluation.Munich: Lincom .

Holz, Christoph & Leo Tomiling (eds.). 2026. Órsa: Konomala story book. Kalispell: Education Projects International.

Holz, Christoph & Joseph Kombeng (eds.). Forthcoming. Pini: Tiang story book 2. Kalispell: Education Projects International.

Pan, Chia-Jung & Yang Huang. 2025. Editors of the special issue ‘Proper Names’. Asian Languages and Linguistics.

Pan, Chia-Jung & Yang Huang. 2025. Proper names: Setting the scene. Asian Languages and Linguistics 6.1:1–6. https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.25020.pan

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2025. Linguistic features of indigenous toponymy: Place names and locative nouns in Tsou. Asian Languages and Linguistics 6.1:229–252. https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.25013.pan

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2025. Characteristics of word classes in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan from the typological perspective. Experimental Linguistics Vol. 14.1:13-19+9. (in Chinese)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2025. Classifiers in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan. In Li, Xuping and Gong Cheng, (eds.), Classifiers in Asian Languages: Description and Explanation. Shanghai Educational Publishing House, Shanghai, pp. 127-164. (in Chinese)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2025. Linguistic characteristics and strategies of charismatic speakers: A critical analysis of Han Kuo-yu’s political speeches. In: Wei, Weixiao & Der-lin Chao (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Sociopolitical Context of Language Learning. Routledge, London, pp. 366-382.

Wang, Hechen & Chia-Jung Pan. 2025. An analysis on the characteristics of Chinese instrumental construction: Evidence from ‘Yong’ and ‘Na’. Experimental Linguistics Vol. 14.4: 40-47. (in Chinese)

Wang, Hechen and Chia-Jung Pan. 2026. Markedness in evidential systems: a cross-linguistic study of the languages in China. Folia Linguistica.

Volker, Craig Alan. 2025. ‘English and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea.’ In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes, edited by Kingley Bolton. Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781119518297.eowe00216

Volker, Craig Alan. 2025. ‘The convergence of Nalik with Tok Pisin: two languages becoming one linguistic repertoire’. In Exploring Structures in Languages and Language Contact, edited by Nataliya Levkovych, Julia Nintemann & Maike Vorholt, 93-116. Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter Oldenbourg. DOI 10.1515/9783111496436-005

Upcoming seminars

6 May 2026, Associate Professor Main Naiker,

From Grapes to Kava, Kura (Noni), and Gumbi Gumbi: Two Decades of Plant Chemistry Guided by Cultural Knowledge

29 July 2026, Professor Wayne Atkinson Senior Yorta Yorta Elder and Fellow, University of Melbourne

Oncountry Learning: A Transformative Approach to Indigenous Studies

12 August 2026, Pauline Sameshima Lakehead University, Canada, Paralexic praxis.

Recordings of seminars within the Jawun Multidisciplinary Seminar series are available upon request. These include the recent talk by Cláudio Silva (University of Porto, Portugal), 1 April, ‘Bridging Knowledge Systems: Collaborative Production of a Book with Indigenous Communities in Papua New Guinea’

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages (ACAL)

Staff update

ACAL welcomed Shanthi Kumarage to the team in March 2026. Shanthi is a researcher in psycholinguistics living on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung country. After finishing her PhD at the Australian National University, Shanthi worked in the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne. She will be leading the data wrangling and statistical analysis for the fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey project.

Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS4)

In November, the Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS4) opened to responses nationwide. The survey has been distributed to over 330 individuals and organisations for completion or further distribution. ACAL thanks the ALS community for their support in this process.

As of 1 April 2026, NILS4 has received a total of 216 responses for 145 unique languages, and ACAL is continuing to receive responses. We are particularly excited to share that 92% of responses were led by or completed in collaboration with community representatives of each language. The survey will close on 14 April.

NILS4 is the primary data source for measuring progress against Closing the Gap Target 16: ‘By 2031, there is a sustained increase in number and strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages being spoken.’ Led by co-design participants and the Languages Policy Partnership (set up under Closing the Gap), ACAL has designed an updated methodology to measure language strength as it pertains to Target 16. The methodology considers 5 key criteria that relate to language strength:

1. The number of speakers/users of the language.

2. The proportion of the language group who speak/use the language.

3. The distribution of speakers/users across age groups.

4. The proficiency levels of speakers/users.

5. The frequency of use in core language domains: in conversation, when

talking to children and babies, in ceremony, at home, in school, at work,

and in public.

Data from NILS4 will inform the Productivity Commission’s 2025 Closing the Gap report, to be published in July 2026. Later in 2026, ACAL will also publish its own report discussing results in more detail, as well as sharing the results through a purpose-built interactive online dashboard.

Austlang

The major revamp of the AustLang website is almost complete. Final testing of the website functionality is currently being undertaken and it is expected to be officially launched in the coming months. In the meantime, an interim version of the AustLang database is still available at https://aiatsis.gov.au/AustLang.

Significant content updates for the AustLang database commenced in November 2025, ensuring that accessible and strengths-based language, standardised structures, and consistent citations are incorporated throughout all records. These updates aim to make the database more approachable, consistent and reliable. As of 25 March 2026, 109 records have been updated. This equates to 9.02% of the total database and 26.71% of record page views across a 30-day period.

Paper and Talk

AIATSIS and Living Languages will deliver the sixth Paper and Talk workshop at Maraga, Canberra, between 12 and 23 October 2026. 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. AIATSIS has received interest from a range of communities wishing to attend this year’s Papers and Talk. While the final list of attendees has yet to be decided, we look forward to announcing them in the coming months.

AIATSIS Summit

The 2026 AIATSIS Summit has been announced and will run from 1–5 June at the Gold Coast, in partnership with the Danggan Balun Aboriginal Corporation. The conference theme is Our Truth. Our Power. Our Future. For more information and to register, visit the AIATSIS website:

https://aiatsis.gov.au/whats-new/events/aiatsis-summit-2026

Henry Leslie-O’Neill

Forthcoming Event

Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

University of Western Australia, 1 – 4 December 2026

Call for masterclasses and themed sessions

We invite proposals for masterclasses and themed sessions at the Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society held at the University of Western Australia from 1 to 4 December 2026.

Masterclasses
These will be held on 1 December before the start of the academic program of the conference. Masterclasses are teaching-focused sessions aimed at professional development. Examples are masterclasses on statistics or phonetic analysis. They are typically facilitated by an expert in the relevant field. Masterclasses may have a specific audience, e.g. students, or be open to anyone. Proposals are welcome on any area that is relevant to linguistics.

Please submit proposals for masterclasses, maximum one A4 page, with the name of the facilitator(s), proposed length (half day/full day or an hours value) and a short statement on their relevant expertise, as well as a brief statement on the rationale for proposing the masterclass, and the intended audience. The proposals will undergo a review, and the Program Committee will select proposals based on expertise of the facilitator, fit with the schedule, rationale and intended audience.

Themed sessions

Themed sessions are regular conference sessions that are part of the academic program of the conference (2-4 December), centred around a special topic, such as Australian Indigenous languages or Laboratory Phonology. During the general call for papers, authors will be able to submit their abstracts to accepted themed sessions as well as to the general program. Organisers of themed sessions are in charge of quality assurance guaranteeing that their program meets the general standard of the conference and will review abstracts submitted to their sessions using the same criteria as the main program. Accepted abstracts that are not deemed suitable by session organisers will be included in the general program. We invite proposals for sessions on any aspect of linguistics focused around a coherent theme. Themed sessions should contain 3-8 talks and can replace talk slots with a discussion slot as the organisers see fit if time allows.

Please submit proposals for themed sessions, maximum one A4 page, with the name(s) of the organiser(s), intended length of the session (number of talks) and a short statement on the topic and some contextualisation of how it fits in within the relevant field and the discipline. One additional page may be used to supply references and a list of tentative participants.

Address for submissions: conf@als.asn.au

Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2026
Announcements of accepted workshops/themed sessions: 15 May 2026

All abstracts will be reviewed by the ALS Program Committee

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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