It was great to see so many of you at the ALS conference in Canberra at the end of last year. Attendance numbers were very strong, and there were many really interesting papers… and some nice merch – in the end, and there’s still some left if anyone wants to order a mug, t-shirt or tote bag. Congratulations and thanks to the organisers for their splendid work, and to AIATSIS for their financial and administrative support in facilitating the involvement of First Nations linguists.

Don’t forget that the ALS Research Grants scheme, along with the Laves, Jalwang and Kaldor Scholarships and the Michael Clyne Prize and Barb Kelly Prize are all currently open for applications, so hurry and get your applications in.

On a different note, most of you will be aware of the recent passing of Emeritus Professor Jeff Siegel. Many of us have first-hand experience of Jeff’s outstanding research, generosity and support as a colleague, and all round status as a great and decent human being. We send our condolences to his family, and all his friends and colleagues at UNE and beyond.

Like me, you’re probably eyeing with shock developments for academia and the cultural sector in the US. Harvard has had its funding frozen for refusing a list of administration demands, including (I can’t believe I’m actually saying this) a demand to report to the government students who are hostile to American values. Imagine what less high profile universities with fewer other sources of funding are feeling they have no option but to agree to. I have colleagues whose grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities are being terminated with immediate effect for not aligning with the administration’s priorities. International students with valid visas are being arrested on campus. I have just received news that a planned conference is being cancelled because the organisers don’t feel that they can in good conscience ask international scholars to travel to the US when people with valid documents have been detained at the border. It was impossible to imagine all this only months ago. How easy it is to suddenly lose things we take for granted.

There are two particular issues I’d like to bring the members up to date about. The first relates to the review of the Australian Research Council’s National Competitive Grants Program. Following the review process in 2024, the ARC have released the Discussion Paper A New Plan for ARC-Funded Research. This proposes a complete overhaul of the Grants Program, with all the grants we’re familiar with being replaced with a completely new suite of grant schemes. This discussion paper can be viewed at https://www.arc.gov.au/engage-us/consultations/policy-review-national-competitive-grants-program. I encourage members to have a look at what is being proposed. There are many positive aspects to the proposed program of grants, but also issues that need further consideration or rethinking. The process now involves submissions in response to the discussion paper, which have just closed. A few weeks ago I emailed the membership calling for your thoughts on the proposals, and drawing heavily on the feedback I received, I prepared a submission from ALS. I’ll post our submission on the ALS website shortly.

The second issue relates to Honours. I had a perception that there is something of a move away from Honours in a few Australian Universities, so I thought it might be useful for us to get a sense of what’s happening across the sector. On that basis I surveyed linguistics departments and disciplines across the sector on what advanced undergraduate or early postgraduate research pathways exist. I wanted to elicit information from two perspectives: pathways from UG to PhD; and options for students who want to do some research to round out their university experience, without an intention of going on to a PhD. I was not focused on coursework Masters etc.

I surveyed discipline leads and other relevant staff at 15 universities with linguistics programs: Adelaide, ANU, CDU, Griffith, Latrobe, Macquarie, Melbourne, Monash, Newcastle, Queensland, Sydney, UNE, UNSW, UWA, and Western Sydney. I’m grateful for the responses of Ben McCann, Carmel O’Shannessy, Celeste Rodriguez-Louro, Chloé Diskin-Holdaway, Clair Hill, Felicity Cox, Ilana Mushin, James Bednall, Jill Vaughan, Lauren Gawne, Mae Carroll, Nick Enfield, Rob Mailhammer, Rosey Billington, Sally Dixon, Samantha Rarrick, and Wayan I Arka.

I asked the following questions:

Does your university have undergraduate Honours. If so, is it end-on, or embedded? Does it form a 4 year degree?

If you do have Honours, is there a plan or talk of abolishing Honours, and if so in favour of what alternative?

What small postgraduate research options does your university have (e.g. MA, MPhil, Grad Dip, etc)? Which of these make a student eligible for the PhD program?

What other pathways from UG to PhD are there, if any?

I have summarised the results of the survey, and that summary is attached at the end of this newsletter. I’ll post a fuller versions of the responses on the website shortly.

Bill Palmer

News from the University of New England (UNE)

In Memoriam

We are so sorry to have lost our colleague and dear friend, Emeritus Professor Jeff Siegel, who passed away on 8 March 2025. He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in July 2024 and his treatment stopped working in January 2025. Until the very end, he remained focused on the activities and projects and people that mattered so much to him.

This photo was taken in February 2025, on his “last bushwalk”:

Jeff Siegel and Diana Eades, Blue Mountains, February 2025

Thesis Completion

Congratulations to Jacob Lee for passing his Masters thesis, A Critical Discourse Study of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: From the Periphery to Hegemony (supervisor: Jane Ahlstrand). Reviewers commended that the thesis “is well positioned in relevant discourse analytic (DA) literature; is underpinned by well thought out and interesting research questions; successfully employs a well-tested and sound methodology… and posits plausible and interesting findings that lend themselves to future doctoral dissertation study.”

Publications

Journal articles:

Odhiambo, E.C. (2025). Decolonizing the History of Political Governance in Kenya: Critical Reflections on Linguistic and Cultural Imperatives. Africa Review. Brill.

Smith-Khan, L. (accepted, forthcoming). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education. Language, Culture and Curriculum

Smith-Khan, L. & Giles, C. (online 2025). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1037969X251314205

Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I. & Torsh, H. Trust at the Border: Identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. (2024) Journal of Law and Society, 51(4), 513-538, https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Book Chapters:

Ndhlovu F & Odhiambo, E.C. (2024). Decolonizing the Linguistic Encirclement of Africa. In F. Ndhlovu & S. Ndlovu- Gatsheni (Eds). Language and Decolonization: An Interdisciplinary Approach. London & New York: Routledge.

Reid, N, P Nunn, B McNair, L Djabibba, R Kumar, I Ward. ‘Deep Water Knowledge: Indigenous Recollections of Rising Ocean Levels’. In M Langton, A Corn, S Curkpatrick, eds. Indigenous Knowledge: Australian Perspectives. Melbourne University Press, ISBN: 9780522880755, https://www.mup.com.au/books/indigenous-knowledge-paperback-softback

Peer-reviewed blog posts/research podcasts:

Smith-Khan, L. Meet the JLS author: Trust at the border: reality TV, securitization and the construction of (in)credibility, Journal of Law and Society Blog, 11 December 2024, https://journaloflawandsociety.co.uk/blog/meet-the-jls-author-trust-at-the-border-reality-tv-securitization-and-the-construction-of-incredibility/ ;

Smith-Khan, L. Trust and suspicion at the airport. Language on the Move, 9 December 2024 https://www.languageonthemove.com/trust-and-suspicion-at-the-airport/

Smith-Khan, L. Judging refugees, Blog post and podcast episode with Dr Anthea Vogl, Language on the Move, 2 November 2024, https://www.languageonthemove.com/judging-refugees/;

Laura Smith-Khan interviewed by Quick, B. Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media, Language on the Move, 24 December 2024, https://www.languageonthemove.com/whiteness-accents-and-childrens-media/

Book reviews:

Laura Smith-Khan review of Anthea Vogl, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination, International Journal of Refugee Law, Volume 36, Issue 3, October 2024, Pages 342–349, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeae030

Presentations

Odhiambo, E.C. (2025). Unshackling Voices: Colonial languages, Social Movements and Decolonisation. Presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL)2025. Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA, March 22-25, 2025.

Odhiambo, E.C. (2025). The Politics of Marginality: Sheng, Youth and Political Participation in contemporary Kenya. Presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL)2025. Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA, March 22-25, 2025.

Odhiambo, E.C. (2025). Decolonising Political Governance: Locating Participation through Sociolinguistic justice. Presented at the 2025 Australian Social Policy Higher Degree by Research (APS-HDR) Conference. The Australian National University, Australia, February 12-13, 2025.

Odhiambo, E.C. (2024). Rethinking Political Governance and Social Justice from a Multilingual Perspective. Presented at the 2024 Research Pathways Conference. The University of New England, Australia, October 16-17, 2024.

Ndhlovu F & Odhiambo, E.C. (2024). Decolonizing the Linguistic Encirclement of Africa. Presented at the Research Futures Symposium 2024. The University of New England, Australia, October 14, 2024.

Laura Smith-Khan: Refugees, Migrants and Discrimination, presentations for local primary school students, 21 March 2025

Laura Smith-Khan: Learning about one’s rights across language barriers: Legal literacy in a linguistically diverse society, conference presentation, Australian Aotearoa New Zealand Economic Social and Cultural Rights Network, 14 November 2024, UTS.

Laura Smith-Khan: Intercultural and professional communication in migration law education, 18 October 2024, invited seminar, Western Sydney University

Laura Smith-Khan: Communicating credibly in refugee status determination, 8 October 2024, invited presentation, Macquarie University

Media

Laura Smith-Khan has published with Ingrid Piller and Hanna Torsh on border encounters; their research has been used recently in the Australian Human Rights Commission anti-racism campaign: Do I fear being stopped more frequently by airport security because of my race? | Racism. It Stops With Me

Funding

Laura Smith-Khan received a UNE Internal Funding Scheme small grant to conduct a project on improving migrant legal literacy in regional and urban NSW in 2025.

Work in Progress

Margaret Sharpe is now working on two dictionaries of the northern dialects of Bundjalung, a bigger one and a smaller one. The bigger one is being revised, and will include example sentences. The smaller Gurgun Mibiñah Ŋahrijun is a fun dictionary. It will be a basic dictionary of at most 500 words (nouns, adjectives verbs and useful help in using sentences and phrases). It will include useful conversational words, and provide understanding of how the language had ways to engineer new phases and descriptions.

Cindy Schneider

News from the University of Newcastle

People and visits

Kiwako Ito has won the New Colombo Plan Mobility grant for 2025-2026 for a new exchange program with internships in Japan, collaborating with Notre Dame Seishin University (Okayama, Japan) and University of Kitakyushu (Kitakyushu, Japan). Kiwa is also continuing her role as Director of the Lab for Applied Language Science (LALS) (www.newcastle.edu.au/school/humanities-creative-industries-social-sciences/research/research-area-highlights/highlights/social-sciences-research/lab-for-applied-language-science). LALS is a hive of activity with undergraduates, postgrads and staff working on a range of projects, many involving the lab’s sophisticated eye-tracking setup. Also continuing is the collaboration between LALS and VideoTranslatorAI on the Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Challenge project funded by NSW Small Business Innovation and Research Program.

Jayden Macklin-Cordes is a currently a visiting scholar at the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, from 28 March to 29 April.

Jaime Hunt continued his work as a Cooperation Partner on the project The impact of language ideologies on register distinctions in multilingual contexts, based at the Language in Urban Diversity Centre at Humboldt-University Berlin. Project Leader Professor Heike Wiese, Humboldt’s Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts, spent November 2024-February 2025 visiting the University of Newcastle, along with PhD Candidate Victoria Ohlia, who collected language data from speakers of German as a heritage language in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley for her thesis Linguistic diversity among German speakers in multilingual Australia. While in Australia the team reported on its findings at the ALS conference in November. In a separate project, Jaime and collaborators Newcastle historians Sacha Davis and Julie McIntyre are continuing work on their project on German in the Hunter Valley, funded in part by the ALS Research Grant scheme. An exhibition entitled Heimat in the Hunter is in preparation with the Newcastle Museum, curated by the the museum’s Chief Curator Bridie Moran (dates 17 June – 21 September 2025).

Following several years as Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, Newcastle PhD graduate and adjunct Ellen Smith-Dennis returned to Australia and took up the position of Linguist at Miromaa Aboriginal Language and Technology Centre in Newcastle in January 2025. Ellen is researching the Awabakal language, in order to support the expansion of the Awabakal Language Program. Before returning Newcastle, Ellen completed her UK Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Award project Language maintenance and supplementary language schools in Coventry: improving publicity, enrolment and quality of provision. She ran a workshop at the University of Warwick with school teachers and city council members, and co-produced a website Coventry Language Schools Network.

In addition to Alan Libert’s adjunct work at Newcastle and Adjunct Professorship with Department of English Language and Literature, Khazar University, Azerbaijan, Alan has begun doing volunteer online English tutoring for two organizations which arrange this tutoring for Ukrainians, Engin (https://www.enginprogram.org/) and Balakun (https://balakun.org/). Alan encourages others to get involved in this worthy cause, and in a small way try to help Ukraine.

Call for submissions

Kiwako Ito is currently guest editor of a Special Issue The Impacts of Phonetically Variable Input on Language Learning for the online journal Languages, and is calling for submissions, due by September 2025.

Today’s language users and learners are equipped with various virtual communication devices and have quick and easy daily access to speech samples of multiple talkers. The goal of this Special Issue is to gauge whether and how real-world phonetic variability affects people’s daily communication and language learning. We welcome papers that report empirical findings of how multi-talker input or multi-dialectal input impacts language processing and learning in diverse communities. We invite submissions of research that reports systematic analyses of phonetic variations in any situations that may make people face dialectal, sociolectal and individual differences in pronunciation, or research studies that report the effect of phonetically variable input on various language learners and users, including children, adult L2 learners, sign language users, aging adults, and individuals with developmental disorders.

PhDs and Honours news

PhDs have been awarded to Page Maitland for the thesis An investigation of language change and contact effects on verbal categories in languages of New Guinea (supervisors Bill Palmer and Catriona Malau), and Laurits Stapput Knudsen for the thesis Language, landscape, cognition and culture in Wik-Mungkan: A sociotopographic study of spatial grammar (supervisors Bill Palmer and Catriona Malau). Suzan Makhloof submitted her thesis "DeYa understand?": A phonological study of ESL Arab learners' listening comprehension of English Weak Forms (supervisors Alan Libert, Bill Palmer and Massoud Omar).

Elizabeth G. Walker completed her Honours thesis Space in Auslan: Documenting the spatial language of Australian Sign Language (supervisor Kiwako Ito), and Georgia Hore completed her thesis Linguistic politeness in the translation of Manga (supervisors Marie-Laure Vuaile-Barcan and Kiwako Ito).

Honours student Madi Lock has been awarded a New Colombo Plan scholarship to carry out her honours project in Solomon Islands and Japan. The project is Attitudes towards Auslan and signed communication for spatial orientation in the Solomon Islands Deaf community. This research aims to develop knowledge and insights into factors that are shaping the development of a sign language in the Solomon Islands deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) community. The research will investigate how Auslan is influencing Solomon Islands Sign Language (SISL) using an interactive experimental task that elicits expressions for space orientation. The project also includes an interview/questionnaire for understanding the DHH community members’ attitude toward Auslan.

Studies of Language Association magazine launch

In March, the University of Newcastle’s Studies of Language Association (SoLA) launched their annual magazine Corpus, produced by languages and linguistics students to share their love of what they do with the broader community. The event, held at popular Newcastle bookshop Betty Loves Books, starred talks from linguists and language lovers featured in the magazine, and was well attended and a fun night.

Grants

Harvey, Mark, with Nungalinya College. The Larrakia landscape. DITRDCA Indigenous Language and Arts Program

Ito, Kiwako. Creating a database for emergency Auslan communication system. HCISS Horizons. School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle.

Publications since November

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke Louise, Robert Mailhammer, Brett Baker, Yizhou Wang, Mark Harvey & Chloe Turner. 2025. Lenition, fortition, and lexical access in Iwaidja and Mawng. Laboratory Phonology 16(1). (doi:10.16995/labphon.15347)

Harvey, Mark & Robert Mailhammer. 2024. Proto-Australian: Reconstruction of a Common Ancestor Language. Berlin: de Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783111421889)

Knudsen, Laurits Stapput & Bill Palmer. 2025. Contextualizing “cardinals”: The semantics of geocentric terms in Wik-Mungkan. Australian Journal of Linguistics 45(1):1–42. (doi: 10.1080/07268602.2024.2423090)

Libert, Alan R. (ed.) 2025. 11^th International Black Sea Coastline Countries Scientific Research Proceedings Book. New York: Liberty Publishing. pp1-4

Libert, Alan R. 2025. Terms for the Black Sea in artificial auxiliary languages. In Libert (ed.)

Libert, Alan R. 2024. Afroasiatic words in Ardano. In I. Erpay (ed.) Bilsel Uluslararasi Korykos Bilimsel Arastirmalar ve Inovasyon Kongresi Kongre Kitabi. Istanbul: Bilsel Publishing. pp111-115

Minai, Utako, Kiwako Ito & Adam Royer. 2025. Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults. Journal of Child Language 52:96-116

Smith-Dennis, Ellen. 2025. Language shift, maintenance and revitalisation in Papua New Guinea. In Jeroen Darquennes, Joe Salmons& Wim Vandenbussche (eds.) Language Contact: An international handbook, Volume 2. pp. 619-640. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Conference presentations since November

Browne, Mitchell, Michael Proctor, Jane Simpson, Mark Harvey, Robert Mailhammer & Harriet Carpenter. 2024. Stop oppositions in Warumungu: A distributional and acoustic analysis. 19^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Melbourne.

Cowan, Alex, Kiwako Ito & Joshua Osborn. 2024. PI training improves subject-verb agreement production in Chinese learners of English: a picture description study. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Cowan, Alex, Kiwako Ito & Alexander Thorpe. 2024. Training to improve subject-verb agreement processing in Chinese learners of English: a picture selection study. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Gaby, Alice, Ashmore Louise, Laurits Stapput Knudsen, Bill Palmer, Jean-Christophe Verstraete & Oscar Whitehead. 2024. Rotating the Paman compass: Tracing pathways of semantic change in directional adverbs. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Gray, James, Jane Simpson & Mark Harvey. 2024. Associated Path constructions without a path in Anmatyerr. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Harvey, Mark, Jane Simpson, James Gray & Robert Mailhammer. 2024. Complex verbal constructions in Central Australia. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Huo, Jiawen & Kiwako Ito. 2024. Chinese ESL learners’ difficulty in Australian vowel production. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Ito, Kiwako, Bill Palmer, Alexander Thorpe & Elizabeth Walker 2024. Whose side are you on? Individual differences in perspective taking during interpretation of transverse spatial terms. 2024. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Ito, Kiwako, Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, Pauline Welby, Wynne Wong, Thierno Aliou Diallo & Madeleine Lock. 2024. Effect of dialectally variable input on the acquisition of French gender-marking clitics. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Libert, Alan R. 2024. Artificial language design as a science and an art. International Conference on Arts and Sciences, University of Southeastern Philippines. (Plenary speaker)

Libert, Alan R. 2025. Creating words that work: Vocabulary design in artificial auxiliary languages. LC Conference and IMLD Celebration. Linguists Collective, UK.

Libert, Alan R. 2025. Crimean Tartar. Sydney Language Festival, Sydney.

Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L., Mitchell Browne, Thomas Ennever & Maria Copot. 2024. Locative functions beyond space and time: Pama-Nyungan case semantics reflect ahistorical processes. 15^th Conference of the Association of Linguistic Typology. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L., Mitchell Browne, Thomas Ennever & Maria Copot. 2024. Locative polyfunctionality in Australia: Function distribution is not predicted by phylogeny or contact. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Mais Alsabayleh, Jaime Hunt & Kiwako Ito. 2024. Jordanians’ pronunciation of phonetically adapted English loanwords and their attitudes towards the English language. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Maitland, Page. 2024. Contact induced change in languages of the Mamberamo Basin area, and a TAM-based case for genetic relation of Lakes Plain and Sko. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Oliha, Victoria, Jaime Hunt & Heike Wiese. 2024. Register data from heritage-language communities: German in Australia. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Palmer, Bill. 2024. Directional terms in Tangkic languages. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Smith-Dennis, Ellen. 2024. Supplementary language school provision and language maintenance in Coventry, U.K. Networking Workshop on Supplementary Education in Theory, Policy and Practice, University of Birmingham.

Smith-Dennis, Ellen. 2024. Supplementary language school provision and language maintenance in Coventry, U.K. 21^st International Association of Applied Linguistics World Congress, Kuala Lumpur.

Walker, Elizabeth & Kiwako Ito. 2024. Space in Auslan: Documentation of the spatial language of Australian Sign Language. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Watson, Nicholas. 2024. An acoustic phonetic analysis of Dhanggati. ALS 2024, ANU, Canberra.

Bill Palmer

News from the University of Queensland

New program:

Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalisation (GCILR)

The first offering of Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalisation began in August 2024 and the final course will be completed in May 2025, with the first cohort of 13 students on track to complete the Program. Enrolment for the 2025-2026 intake is now open.

The exhibition Wangka Walytia, outcome of the ARC DP ‘Illustrated Literature of Papunya and Strelley’ showed at Papunya Tjupi Gallery, Papunya in November 2024, and will show at the Libraries and Archives NT exhibition space from 1 April - September 2025.

New Project:

Felicity Meakins, Myf Turpin and Linda Barwick have begun their new ARC Project ‘Dingo Lingo: Australia's past through the lens of biology, language & music’ (DP250104567).

Ilana Mushin and Henrik Bergqvist (University of Gothenburg) ran our first KNOWGRAIN (Knowledge, Grammar and Interaction) workshop in Tollered, Sweden in February 2025, bringing together documentary and descriptive linguists to develop new methods for using old data for studying epistemics in grammar and interaction.

New PhD!

Weinglass, Lara (2024). Humour and Laughter at work: Sustained Humour Episodes in Australian Blue-Collar Workplaces.

New Publications:

Alshammari, Bandar and Michael Haugh (2024). Troubles-complaints and the overall structural organisation of troubles-remedy sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction 57(2): 215-234.

Alshammari, Bandar and Michael Haugh (2025). Negotiating moral responsibility for remedying troubles. In Michael Haugh and Rosina Márquez Reiter (eds.), Morality in Discourse (pp.66-94). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chang, Wei-Lin Melody (2025). “Being your son is rather tiring”: Assessments and assessment responses in initial interactions in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics, 235, 43-59.

Fillmore, Naomi, Samantha Disbray, Michael Haugh, Wei-Lin Melody Chang, Des Crump and Kayoko Hashimoto (2024). Pathways to teaching global languages: Challenges, opportunities, and implications for Asian language teachers in Australian schools. In Kayoko Hashimoto (ed.), Rethinking the Asian Language Learning Paradigm in Australia (pp.17-44). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hames, Sam, Michael Haugh and Simon Musgrave (2025). “How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of ‘unparliamentary’ in the Australian Federal Parliament. Lingua 320: 103932.

Haugh, Michael and Rosina Márquez Reiter (eds.) (2025) Morality in Discourse. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Haugh, Michael (2024). Ostensible offers, politeness and sincere hypocrisy. In Sandrine Sorlin and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Hypocrisy: Towards a Pragmatic Model (pp.162-186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Jepson, Kathleen. 2025. Contrastive vowel length and segment duration in production and perception in Djambarrpuyŋu. Laboratory Phonology16(1). doi: 10.16995/labphon.10161

Jepson, Kathleen & Rasmus Puggaard-Rode. 2024. Vowel duration beyond contrastive length in Djambarrpuyŋu. In Olga Maxwell & Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 142–146. Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Jepson, Kathleen, Rosey Billington & Jill Vaughan. 2024. The Linguistics Roadshow. Linguistics Vanguard 10(s3), 231-243. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2024-0122

Puggaard-Rode, Rasmus & Kathleen Jepson. 2024. Stop production in Dhuwaya: Implications for literacy teaching. In Pärtel Lippus (ed.), Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Applied Phonetics, 71–76. International Speech Communication Association. doi:10.21437/ISAPh.2024-14.

Ilana Mushin

News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)

Teaching and learning

A new undergraduate (IAS302) and postgraduate (IAS510) unit, “Language, Crime, and the Law: Forensic Linguistics”, has been designed and is being delivered in Semester 1 2025 by Awni Etaywe.

HDR news

Welcome to Edith Kirlew, who started her PhD at CDU Casuarina Campus in September 2024. Edith’s PhD project looks into identifying mathematical expression for teaching and learning mathematics in Kriol, and is supervised by Cris Edmonds-Wathen and James Bednall. Edith successfully completed her Confirmation of Candidature on 31 March.

New projects

James Bednall is part of a team (with the Badimia Language Team and the Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre) who have been awarded a First Nations Language Education grant from the Department of Education and FLA for the Badimia Guwaga FNLE Project (2025-27). The project aims to build language capacity in the Badimia community, increasing and enhancing existing language knowledge, and providing support for new Badimia language educators, through community-led and -designed programs. The project started with a 4-day On-Country workshop in Mt Magnet, WA, 27 Feb-2 March.

Awni Etaywe has been awarded a Category 1 Grant of $200,000 from the Department of Home Affairs for his research on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) in Australia. This grant, part of Phase 2 of the National Research Project on CVE, highlights CDU’s leadership in tackling security challenges through cutting-edge linguistic analysis. Etaywe’s research will examine the intersection of extremist discourse, disinformation, and social polarisation.

Awni Etaywe conducted an experiment on AI and disinformation-fuelled radicalisation, on a far-right extremist manifesto to evaluate whether DeepSeek and ChatGPT can assist in combating disinformation-driven radicalisation. The experiment received local media coverage and has been widely cited: https://smbtech.au/news/cdu-uses-deepseek-chatgpt-to-expose-disinformation/ ; CommsRoom: "DeepSeek’s Rise: A Game Changer or a Security Threat?

Visiting Fellowship

James Bednall was awarded an ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC) funded Visting Fellowship, where he spent Nov-Dec 2024 at the ANU for the project Mamawura-langwa, angalya-langwa: About time and space in Anindilyakwa.

Publications

Etaywe, Awni. (in preparation). Forensic linguistics of terrorist incitement through stance and disinformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Garŋgulkpuy, Joanne, Raymattja Marika, James Wapiriny Gurruwiwi, Joy Bulkanhawuy, Elaine Ḻäwurrpa Maypilama, Timothy Buthimaŋ, Ian Mongunu Gumbula & Gawura Waṉambi. Edited by Gawura Waṉambi, Yasunori Hayashi & Michael Christie. 2025. A Yolŋu Philosophy Reader. Charles Darwin University. https://oercollective.caul.edu.au/yolnu-philosophy-reader

Presentations

Bednall, James. 2024. An introduction to the diversity of First Nations languages in the NT, with some EAL/D considerations for teachers. ATESOL-NT Webinar. 17 October 2024, Darwin, Australia.

Bednall, James. 2024. Opportunities and challenges of undergraduate linguistics teaching in the NT: Case studies from CDU. ALS Conference. 28 November 204, ANU, Canberra.

Conferences

CDU Linguistics will be hosting the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Conference, 17-19 November 2025. The call for papers is now open (closing 17 May), please check the conference website for further information: http://alaaconference.cdu.edu.au

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 Monash University

GENERAL NEWS

Monash Linguistics is pleased to announce our newest addition to the program — Isabelle (Izzy) Burke. Welcome Izzy!

Howie Manns has co-written and starred in an SBS Learn English/On Demand explainer series called "Weird and Wonderful Aussie English". It is currently in post-production and expected to be released in the next few months. Howie has written a five week lesson on "Slang" for the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE), soon to be published in their "Middle Ground" series. He currently has two regular ABC segments on ABC Southeast SA and ABC Sydney, NSW and ACT (the latter with Kate Burridge). He has also published one article each in the ADF magazine "Yarning", The Conversation (with Kate Burridge) and the Monash Lens. Lastly, Howie has recorded and is finalising a 10-episode Indonesian language and culture podcast ("Bloody Bagus", with Jess Kruk), which includes lessons for the Indonesian secondary classroom.

Marc Xu is involved in a new project: the Monash University Faculty of Arts Emerging Strength Seed Scheme (2025): Indigenising Knowledge: Incorporating Multicultural and Indigenous Perspectives into Action Research and Reciprocal Teaching and Learning.

GRANTS/FELLOWSHIPS

ARC DP 'Where Gesture Meets Grammar: Crosslinguistic Multimodal Communication' – Anna Margetts, Lucien Brown, Jill Vaughan & Sotaro Kita. This project aims to investigate both differences and universal tendencies in the interplay of speech and gesture across four languages of importance for Australia (Australian English, Burarra (Arnhem Land), Saliba (PNG), Korean). The project began in late 2024 and we have organised several project events to bring together multimodality researchers in Aus:

Monash workshop on Multimodality and Embodied Language (Nov 24)

ALS workshop 'Gesture, sign and embodied language' (Nov 24)

ALS Gesture Masterclass with Sotaro Kita

Monash seminar series: Working with Multimodal Data (March-May 25)

Louisa Willoughby has commenced her Industry Fellowship, working with Melbourne Polytechnic and the Victorian Deaf Education Institute on the project Transforming Auslan Education in Australia. You can read more about the project here: https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/monash-faculty-of-arts-awarded-nearly-$1-million-in-arc-mid-career-industry-fellowships

Alice Gaby has been working with Living Languages as an ARC Industry Fellow, developing resources to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to reclaim their languages. A focal event in this project is the Paper & Talk institute, run in collaboration with AIATSIS (learn more here and here).

BOOKS, EDITED VOLUMES AND SPECIAL ISSUES

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

Burke, I & Hughes, D. (eds) (2024). From “People’s Poetry” to “Dustbin Language”: Slang in Australian English (The Australian Journal of Linguistics, Special Issue)

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Burke, I. & Manns, H. (2024). Australia's idiomatic expressions: "speaking the to manage social relations. The Australian Journal of Linguistics. 44 (4): 365-389.

Burke, Isabelle (2025). Australian English Grammar. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes.

Burridge, K., (2024) “Survival of the fittest” – the evolution of slanguage. The Australian Journal of Linguistics. 44 (4): 340-364

Cunliffe, E., Vinuesa, C. G., Rego, R., San Roque, M., Edmond, G., Gans, J., Satoh, M., Burridge, K., Cordner, S. (2024). AAFS (Victorian branch) Symposium: Science and Medicine in the Courts—Learning from the wrongful conviction of Kathleen Folbigg. Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00450618.2024.2419106

Delmas, M., Kruk, J., Willoughby, L., & Angouri, J. (2025). Doing multilingualism through transnational linguistic landscaping: The MultiDiv experience. Linguistics and Education, 86, 101384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2025.101384

Grasso, S., Nambu, Satoshi, & and Willoughby, L. (2025). Multilingual parents’ language development concerns in the early years. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, (86),1–16.

Jepson, K., R. Billington & J. Vaughan. (2024). The Linguistics Roadshow. Linguistics Vanguard (Special Issue: Public Outreach in Linguistics).

Ma, Qing, Su, Xiaoqi, Erni, John Nguyet, & Xu, Zhichang. (2025). Exploring transcultural translanguaging strategies in English literature of a bilingual Chinese author: a corpus-based study. Asian Englishes.

Manns, H. (2025). The Australian lexicon. In K. Bolton (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopaedia of World Englishes. Wiley Blackwell.

Manns, H., Musgrave, S., Burridge, K., Burke, I., Hughes, D. S. & Allan, K., 2024, What is Australian slang? Is it really slang? The Australian Journal of Linguistics. 44 (4): 283-303.

Newman, J. 2024. Revisiting N waiting to happen: Word, construction, and corpus choices in a collostructional analysis. Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory.

Newman, J. and Ying Zhang. (2025). Mandarin posture verbs: Cardinality, patterns of usage, and constructional preferences. Chinese Language and Discourse 16.1: 28–54.

Peeters, W., & Ito Maitland, A. (2024). Different Times, Different Measures: Monitoring Shifting Self-regulation Strategies for Language Learning in Higher Education Across Face-To-Face, Online and Hybrid Instruction. In International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography (pp. 3-18). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Peters, Pam & Burke, Isabelle (2024). Negative politeness and no worries in Australian English. World Englishes: Special Issue: World Englishes and Sociolinguistic Variation 44 (1-2). pp. 253-268.

Smeets, I., Egger, C. B., de Knecht, S., Land-Zandstra, A. M., Meinsma, A. L., Peeters, W., & Verkade, A. (2025). Citizens' perspectives on science communication. Journal of Science Communication, 24(1).

Willoughby, L., Nambu, S., & Pezzotti, B. (2024). One cohort or two? Enjoyment, anxiety and study behaviours among intermediate language learners in tertiary language classes. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.

Willoughby, L., Schembri, A., & Kruk, J. (2025). Sign language for all? Profile and retention of students in a beginner sign language program. The Modern Language Journal, 109(1), 216–233.

Willoughby, L., Smith, R., & Johnston, T. (2024). The GeSCA repository: Gesture and Sign Corpus of Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 1–18.

Xu, Zhichang. (2025). Editorial: Indigenising knowledge in world Englishes. English Today, 40(4), 1.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Biewer, C. & Burridge, K., (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, K. & Manns, H., (2024). Shapers of Slang: Australian English Through the Lens of the Dynamic Model. In: Sofia Rüdiger, Theresa Neumaier, Sven Leuckert & Sarah Buschfeld (eds.) World Englishes in the 21st Century: New Perspectives and Challenges to the Dynamic Model pp. 340-357. Edinburgh University Press.

Xu, Zhichang. (2024). An Antipodean Case of South and Southeast Asian Students' Reflections on the Realities of Real English in an EMI Course. In Ram Ashish Giri, Amol Padwad, & M. M. Naushaad Kabir (Eds.), Equity, Social Justice, and English Medium Instruction: Case Studies from Asia (pp. 49-63). Singapore: Springer.

Xu, Zhichang. (2025). Chinese Englishes. In Kingsley Bolton (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes: Wiley-Blackwell.

PHD COMPLETIONS

ABDULWDOOD BAHHARI (supervisors Louisa Willoughby, Howard Manns): Arabic teaching in the diaspora.
DANYA ZHANG (supervisors Marc Xu, Hui Huang) A tale of two cities: Exploring the functions of English by Chinese professionals in Kunming and Beijing
DAVID FARRER (supervisors Kate Burridge, Olav Kuhn): The Spread of Indo-European into Europe: A Diachronic and Geolinguistic Study.
HUGH WILSON NETTELBECK (Shani Tobias, Rebecca Margolis, Tessa Dwyer) Decision making in the subtitling process – Facilitating communication between stakeholders
PURNAMA CAHYA (supervisors Hui Huang and Naomi Kurata): Examining Motivational Dynamics in EFL Classrooms: The Case of Indonesian Undergraduate Students.
SOYEON KIM (supervisors Lucien Brown, Naomi Kurata, Daniel Piper): Family Language Policy of Cross-Cultural Families in Australia and South Korea.
SUZANNE GRASSO (supervisors Louisa Willoughby, Anna Margetts): Multilingual Development Advice At The Maternal And Child Health Service.
TOM ENNEVER (supervisors Alice Gaby and Anna Margetts): Topics in A Grammar Of Space of Kukatja.
WANYU LIAO (supervisors Hui Huang, Robyn Spencer-Brown): Heritage language learning of Chinese background children in Australia.

Kate Burridge

News from Macquarie University

Phonetics Lab Updates

We welcome Alfredo (Alfie) Herrero de Haro. Alfie, from the Universidad de Granada (Spain), is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics of Macquarie University in 2025. Alfie is developing an interactive linguistic atlas of southern Spanish accents (https://acentosandaluces.com/), and he will be carrying out phonetic analyses of Spanish data and exploring how to adapt his project to study variation in Australian English during his time at Macquarie University.

Mitchell Browne is the recipient of a MQRF for the project The birth of new Australian Aboriginal Languages: the role of speaker identity in language genesis, for which he is sponsored by Michael Proctor and supervised by Joe Blythe.

We sadly said goodbye to Louise Ratko, who has moved on to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere. She will continue to be missed!

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 ($909,646)

Publications

Book Chapter
Cox, F., Palethorpe, S., & Penney, J. (2024). Fifty years of monophthong and diphthong shifts in Australian English. In F. Kleber & T. Rathcke (Eds.), Speech Dynamics: Synchronic Variation and Diachronic Change (pp. 17–48). De Gruyter.

Journal Articles:

Calhoun, S., & White, H. (2025). What Makes Iconic Pitch Associations “Natural”: The Effect of Age on Affective Meanings of Uptalk and Creak. Language and Speech, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309251314863

Calhoun, S., Yan, M., & White, H. (2025). Examining focus and alternative priming: Effects of grammatical role and breadth of the alternative set. Journal of Memory and Language, 140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104580

Clements, C., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A., & Cox, F. (in print). Phonological and lexical conditioning of TRAP vowel duration in Australian English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

Cox, F., & Penney, J. (2024). Multicultural Australian English: The new voice of Sydney. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 44(2–3), 200–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2024.2380680.

Penney, J., Weirich, M., & Jannedy, S. (2024). Increased breathiness in adolescent Kiezdeutsch speakers: A marker of multiethnolectal group affiliation? Language and Speech. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309241269059.

Conference Proceedings

Clements, C., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2024). Positional Allophony, Ethnolectal Variation and /l/ Darkness in Australian English. In Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (19th: 2024) (pp. 202-206). Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2024). Voice quality in voiceless coda stop contexts: Evidence from Australian English speakers with English and Arabic language backgrounds. In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST2024, December 3–5, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 217–221).

Piyadasa, T., Proctor, M., Gully, A., Yue, Y., Ballard, K., Sanaei, N., Foster, S., Szalay, T., Waddington, D., & Jin, C. (2024). Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Production using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In O. Maxwell, & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.) Proc. 19th Australasian Intl. Conf. on Speech Science and Technology (SST2024), (pp. 52–56). Melbourne: ASSTA

Proctor, M., Kim, J.-H., Penney, J., Ratko, L., & Cox, F. (2024). Characterizing rhotic articulation in Australian English using ultrasound. In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST2024, December 3–5, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 82-86).

Shea, T., White, H., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2024). Masculinity and sexual orientation as predictors of creaky voice in Australian English speaking men. In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST2024, December 3–5, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 232–236).

Szalay, T., Proctor, M., Gully, A., Piyadasa, T., Jin, C., Waddington, D., Sanaei, N., Yue, Y., Foster, S., & Ballard, K. (2024). Lateral articulation across vowel contexts: insights from magnetic resonance imaging. In O. Maxwell, & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.) Proc. 19th Australasian Intl. Conf. on Speech Science and Technology (SST2024), (pp. 7–11). Melbourne: ASSTA

Tobin, E., Cox, F., Penney, J., & White, H. (2024). Give a little whistle: A neglected characteristic of Australian English productions of /s/. In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST2024, December 3–5, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 87–91).

White, H., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2024). Fillers and creaky voice presence in Australian English. In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST2024, December 3–5, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 152–156).

Yue, Y., Proctor, M., Zhou, L., Gupta, R., Piyadasa, T., Gully, A., Ballard, K., & Jin, C. (2024). Towards Speech Classification from Acoustic and Vocal Tract data in Real-time MRI. In Interspeech Conference (24th: 2024) (pp. 1345-1349). International Speech Communication Association. Kos Island, Greece: ISCA

Invited Presentations

Cox, F. (2024). Reconceptualising Australian English. Forum for Englishes of Australia (Keynote Speaker), La Trobe University, Melbourne, 30 August 2024.

Proctor, M. (2024). Liquid Consonants: New Insights into Goals of Production. NTHU Linguistics Forum College of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTHU, Taiwan, 15 July 2024.

Workshop Seminars

Cox, F. (2024, November 19) Broadening the Focus: Sources of variation in Australian English Phonetics and Phonology. Voices of Regional Australia Workshop, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.

White, H. & Penney, J. (2024, December 2). An Introduction to Methods for Acoustic Analysis of Voice Quality. The 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2024), University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC.

Conference Presentations

Shea, T., White, H., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2024, November 7-9). Effects of Sexual Orientation and Attitude to Gender Roles on Australian Males' f0 Metrics [Conference presentation], 52nd New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach, FL.

Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2024, December 2-5) Community linguistic diversity and socioeconomic status: Modelling phonetic variation in speakers from communities with intersecting predictors [Conference presentation], Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.

Awards:

Elise Tobin received the ASSTA New Researcher Award at the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 3rd-5th 2024, Melbourne, Australia

Timothy Shea was awarded the Best Student Paper at the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 3rd-5th 2024, Melbourne, Australia

News from Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis Lab

Thesis completions

Yang, Jingyi. (2024). Address and Reference in Mandarin TǔCáo. Master of Research, Sydney: Macquarie University. (Supervised by Joe Blythe and Scott Barnes).

Skinner, Natalie, (2025). Communicative competence, cultural and linguistic diversity, and social interaction: An exploratory study of communication disability and agency in childhood. PhD Dissertation, Sydney: Macquarie University. (Supervised by Scott Barnes and Joe Blythe).

Natalie has been offered a contract as Lecturer B (continuing) in Speech Pathology, in the Faculty of Health Sciences at ACU, North Sydney. Congratulations Natalie!

Awards and grants

At ALS2024 in Canberra, lab members and alumni Joe Blythe, Caroline de Dear and Francesco Possemato were awarded the 2024 Rodney Huddleston Award for the best paper published in the Australian Journal of Linguistics:

Mushin, Ilana, Joe Blythe, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear, Rod Gardner, Francesco Possemato, and Lesley Stirling. 2023. “Towards an Interactional Grammar of Interjections: Expressing Compassion in Four Australian Languages.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 43 (2): 158–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2023.2244442.

Josua Dahmen has recently been awarded a two year an ELDP post-doctoral fellowship through the ANU to document the Papuan language Uyajitaya. Congratulations Josh!

News from the Child Language Lab

Journal articles

Mahon, L., Abend, O., Berger, U., Demuth, K., Johnson, M., & Steedman, M. (2025). A language-agnostic model of child language acquisition. Computer Speech and Language, 90, 1-22. Article 101714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2024.101714

Tang, P., Xu Rattanasone, N., Yuen, I., Demuth, K., & Benders, T. (2025). Due to increased variability, the expanded vowel and tone space in Mandarin IDS does not lead to enhanced contrasts. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000925000133

Abrahamse, R., Xu Rattanasone, N., Holt, R., Demuth, K., & Benders, T. (2025). Real-time spoken word recognition in deaf and hard of hearing preschoolers: effects of phonological competition. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000925000066

Xu Rattanasone, N., Brookman, R., Kalashnikova, M., Grant, K.-A., Burnham, D., & Demuth, K. (2024). Maternal input, not transient elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, predicts 2-year-olds' vocabulary development. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000924000308

Lai, J., Chan, A., & Kidd, E. (2024). Production of relative clauses in Cantonese-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder. Brain and Language, 254, 105425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2024.105425

MRes Completions

Nimra Rfiq, (2024) The relationship between bilingual parents’ involvement in supporting children's literacy and numeracy skills and academic performance (Supervisors: Huachen Wang & Nan Xu Rattanasone)

Conference

Xu, F., Tang, P., Demuth, K., Xu Rattanasone, N. (2024) Mandarin-speaking 6-year-olds can use preboundary pitch range expansion to disambiguate compounds from lists. Speech Prosody 2024, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Xu, F., Tang, P., Demuth, K., Xu Rattanasone, N. (2024) Acquiring prosodic cues to word boundaries: Perception and production evidence from Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with cochlear implants. The 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, U.S.A.

Xu, F., Tang, P., Demuth, K., Xu Rattanasone, N. (2024) Prosodic cues guide Mandarin-speaking preschoolers’ identification of compounds but not lists. The 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Melbourne, Australia.

Lai, J., Kim, J-H., & Xu Rattanasone, N. Narrative comprehension abilities of bilingual children in Australia. Paper presented at the ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) Annual Conference 2024, 26th Nov – 29th Nov, 2024, Canberra, Australia

Chan, A., Lai, J., & Mo, M. Sentence repetition as a diagnostic screening tool for Developmental Language Disorder in Cantonese: Evidence from the Cantonese LITMUS-Sentence Repetition Task. Paper presented at the ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) Annual Conference 2024, 26th Nov – 29th Nov, 2024, Canberra, Australia

Yip, V., Lai, J., & Matthews, S. Investigating bilingual development using CHILDES corpora. Invited masterclass, ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) Annual Conference 2024, 26th Nov, 2024, Canberra, Australia

Edited Anthology

Han, W., Chen, L., & Wang, X. (Eds.) (2024). Tonal language processing and acquisition in native and non-native speakers. (Frontiers research topics). Frontiers Media S.A. https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/57047/tonal-language-processing-and-acquisition-in-native-and-non-native-speakers/overview

Journal Articles

Han, W., Wang, X., & Chen, L. (2024). Editorial: tonal language processing and acquisition in native and non-native speakers. Frontiers in Education. 9, 1-2.1531218. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1531218

Junjie, W., Yannan, J., Chuyao, C., Xinping, P., Qiping, W., & Wang, X. (2024). Online Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reveals Dynamic Interactions Between Language Control and Processing in Bilingual Language Production. Retrieved from osf.io/r7u6d. Cerebral Cortex. 34(11), 1-14. Article bhae452. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae452

Liardet, Cassi L., & Black, Sharyn, (2025). Decoding disciplinary expectations: An analysis of lecturers’ expectations and the role of grammatical metaphor in undergraduate assignments. Teaching in Higher Education, 19. doi:10.1080/13562517.2025.2449641

McGrath, Darby, & Liardet, Cassi L. (2025). A grammatical metaphor word list. TESOL Quarterly, 24. doi:10.1002/tesq.3381

Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., & Torsh, H. (2024). Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society, 51(4), 513-538. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Wang, Jiayu, Liardet, Cassi L., & Lum, Juliet (2025). Feeling like an academic writer: an exploration of doctoral students’ struggle for recognition. Studies in Continuing Education, 47(1), 285-301. doi:10.1080/0158037X.2024.2358006.

Wang, Jiayu, & Liardet, Cassi L. (2025). Getting to “the upper end of the novice zone”: an exploration of doctoral students’ writer identity in co-authoring with supervisors for publication. Written Communication, 42(1), 120-151. doi:10.1177/07410883241286902

Wang, Jiayu, Liardet, Cassi L., Lum, Juliet & Riazi, Mehdi (2024). Co-authorship between doctoral students and supervisors: Motivations, reservations, and challenges. Higher Education Research and Development, 43(7), 1615-1631. doi:10.1080/07294360.2024.2354253

Wang, X., Jheng, J., & McMurray, B. (2024). Tone Superimposition Technique in Speech Sciences: A Tutorial. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/kwh7n. Frontiers in Education.

Conference Proceedings

Wang, X., & McMurray, B. (2024). Lexical tone in bilingual crosstalk. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 349-353). (Speech Prosody). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-71

Book Chapters

Wang, X., Hui, B., & Wang, J. (2024). The role of lexical tones in bilingual language processing: evidence from a typing task. In W. Han, & C. Brebner (Eds.), Typical and atypical language development in cultural and linguistic diversity (pp. 23-39). (Routledge Research In Language Education). Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003251194-3

Recent Presentations

Liardet, Cassi L. (2025, January) Exploring Autistic Discourses [invited talk]. Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong.

Liardet, Cassi L. Winfred Xuan, Akiko Nagao, Anne-Coleman Webre and Harni Kartika-Ningsih. (2025, March) Evaluating the methodological rigour in Systemic Functional Linguistics genre-based research for second/foreign language writing [invited talk]. University of Sydney, Australia.

HDR Completions

Other recent HDR completions in the department include:

Nagao, Akiko (2025). Exploring genre-based writing instruction: A scoping review of genre-based approaches and a classroom-based analysis of Systemic Functional Linguistics genre pedagogy in the Japanese university EFL context. Supervisor: Cassi Liardet.

Su, Ruochong (2025). The impact of foreignising translation strategies on the reception of contemporary Chinese short fiction: empirical evidence from psychometric instruments and eye tracking. Supervisors: Jan-Louis Kruger, Jing Fang and Sixin Liao.

Gaikwad, Shrutika (2025). Auditory order perception in adults and school-aged children. Supervisors: Harvey Dillon and Mridula Sharma.

Staff movements

We sadly farewell Associate Professor Phil Chappell, who has recently retired but continues in an honorary capacity as Honorary Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL, and Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, who has taken up a position as Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Sociolinguistics at the University of Hamburg. Congratulations Ingrid!

Joe Blythe

News from the University of Western Australia

Academic promotion

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has been promoted to Level D Associate Professor.

University of Oxford visiting fellowship

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has been awarded a research fellowship to visit All Souls College, University of Oxford, in Hilary Term 2026 (14% success rate).

New partnership

Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard have partnered with Google on a significant project examining how Artificial Intelligence-powered technology may be made more inclusive for First Nations people in Australia. In collaboration with Glenys Collard and Advisory Committee members Sharon Davis and Clint Bracknell, ‘Aboriginal English Voices’ will collect and curate a corpus of Aboriginal English that will be used to improve speech automation, captioning, and other AI-operated systems. Further information on this project can be found here: https://blog.google/intl/en-au/company-news/technology/a-partnership-to-improve-speech-technology-for-first-nations-voices/

New research agreement

In late 2024, UWA’s Language Lab signed a research partnership agreement with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people (PKKP) Aboriginal Corporation to facilitate research activities between the Corporation and the Language Lab / UWA Linguistics.

New book

Congratulations to Jess Kruk whose new book, titled ‘Peripheral Linguistic Brutality’, is now open for pre-order through the University of Hawaii Press website.

Kruk, J., & Robertson, W. (Accepted/In press). Peripheral Linguistic Brutality. University of Hawaii Press.

PhD student updates

PhD candidate Madeleine Clews has completed a draft of her PhD thesis, ‘A historical sociolinguistic study of the shaping of Australian English through the lens of Western Australia’. This is a thesis by publication, with four works already published or accepted for publication, and a further two ready to submit to journals. Madeleine is looking forward to thesis submission and viva in the coming months, as well as preparing presentations for forthcoming conferences in May (Historical Sociolinguistics Network, Bristol, UK), August (New Ways of Analysing Variation, Asia Pacific 8, Singapore) and September (ISLE8, Santiago di Compostela, Spain).

PhD student Lucía Fraiese continues to write her thesis papers on the sociolinguistic identities of First Nations girls in boarding school. Some of these have been submitted for publication; others are being prepared for submission. Lucía spoke about her research on RTRFM radio’s ‘Language Lab’ in October 2024: https://shorturl.at/kABuc. In February 2025, Lucia was awarded a travel bursary to attend the HASS & Indigenous Summer School in Brisbane.

PhD candidate Katharina Frödrich visited Karratha for a meet-and-greet with staff from PKKP Aboriginal Corporation in October 2024. In February 2025, she attended the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons Summer School and Masterclass 2025 in Brisbane, organised by the ARDC, and the Research@Sydney event hosted by Google in Sydney, where Aboriginal English Voices was launched. In March, she completed her confirmation of candidature at UWA, and she is currently on her first fieldwork trip in Karratha, where she has begun her data collection in collaboration with PKKP.

PhD Candidate Alex Stephenson has completed the initial phase of thematic coding for his first round of interviews from fieldwork completed in 2024. He will be travelling to Geraldton to work with Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre in April 2025. Alex has also joined the Language Data Commons of Australia Graduate Digital Research Fellowship program, where he will explore the kinds of support needed to maintain the value of digitised data in a language centre context.

Staff updates

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway's PhD was conferred in October 2024 by the University of Queensland. Her thesis, ‘Paradigm shift: a theoretical and descriptive study of Mudburra-Kriol contact’, is available through UQ ESpace here. Amanda continues to serve as the WA chair for OzCLO, the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad competition for high schoolers. Additionally, Amanda also served as the OzCLO national problems coordinator this year, selecting the problems and compiling the test booklets to be used across Australia. She is also currently teaching our second-year morphosyntax unit and continues working remotely with the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation in Karratha. Her role there has a dual focus on training within the community and data management within the organisation.

Publications

Delmas, M., Kruk, J., Willoughby, L., & Angouri, J. (2025). Doing multilingualism through transnational linguistic landscaping: The MultiDiv experience. Language and Education, 86, Article 101384. Advance online publication.

Evans, B., Gallego, M. K., & Miceli, L. (Eds.) (2024). Historical Linguistics 2019: Selected papers from the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Canberra, 1–5 July 2019. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; Vol. 367). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kruk, J. and Lauren Gawne. (2025). Adolescence has sparked fears over teen slang – but emoji don’t cause radicalisation. The Conversation.

https://theconversation.com/adolescence-has-sparked-fears-over-teen-slang-but-emoji-dont-cause-radicalisation-253218

Roche, G., & Kruk, J. (2024). Towards a sociolinguistics of deglobalization. Language in Society, 1–23.

Rodríguez Louro, C. (2025). Automating silence? Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/automating-silence/

Impact: Read 1,056 times in the first month since publication.

Rodríguez Louro, C. (2024). The unspoken rule of conversation that explains why AI chatbots feel so human. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-unspoken-rule-of-conversation-that-explains-why-ai-chatbots-feel-so-human-243805

Impact: Read 17,345 times in the first week. Second most read article by UWA researcher.

Rodríguez Louro, C., Glenys Collard and Troy Reynolds (2025). Australian Aboriginal English. In Kingsley Bolton (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. London: Wiley Blackwell. 2–10.

Willoughby, L., Schembri, A., & Kruk, J. (2025). Sign language for all? Profile and retention of students in a beginner sign language program. Modern Language Journal, 109(1), 216-233.

Conference presentations

Alex Stephenson presented 'WA Aboriginal Language Centres and Post-Digitisation Futures' at the Digitisation Centre of Western Australia Symposium, State Library of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia. 3 December 2024 (with Knut Olawsky, Annelise Jansen, and Rhys Collard).

Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented ‘Developing Language Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: A Case Study of Integrating Participatory Approaches’ at the Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium. Paris, France, 30 January 2025 (with Ben Hutchinson, Glenys Collard and Ned Cooper).

Workshop presentation

On 18 October 2024, Luisa Miceli delivered the UWA Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Working Group Annual Workshop which focused on understanding what it means to be culturally and linguistically diverse.

Conference organisation

Daniel Midgley is on the organising committee LingComm25, the online conference for linguistic communication.

Awards

Congratulations to Lucía Fraise who received an Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) travel bursary to attend the HASS & Indigenous Summer School in Brisbane.

Invited panel presentation

In March 2025, Celeste Rodríguez Louro was invited to speak at the 2025 Convocation event focusing on AI changes in work, education and society. The event was recorded and can be accessed here:

https://vimeo.com/event/4796698/ec92ac257b

Board of Graduate Research Studies

Celeste Rodríguez Louro has been elected to join UWA’s Board of Graduate Research Studies for the period 2025-2027.

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.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics

Recent publications

Ducasse, Ana María, Hill, Kathryn, Mullan, Kerry, Qi, Jing, Ni, Jindan, Yoshida, Maki & Fujioka, Maya. 2024. The tangle in the feedback loop: Learner agency through a feedback loop activity across four university language programs. Practitioner Research in Higher Education, Online First, 82-102.

Fukuno, Maho. 2024. Humanising translator and interpreter ethics for critical language users: A case of what the impartial model can learn from the ‘empathetic’ model. In J. Kinder, N. Fraschini & M. Caruso (Eds.), Enabling learning: Teaching languages for Australian universities. ANU Press.

Mejía, Glenda & Chaves-Solis, Susana. 2025. Aprendiendo Español en Australia. RMIT Open Press and license under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Mullan, Kerry. 2024. “Resident superhero”: Community veneration on Facebook. Internet Pragmatics, 63 - 100. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00112.mul

Mullan, Kerry & Béal, Christine. 2024. The use of humour to deal with uncomfortable moments in interaction: a cross-cultural approach. In Vanderheiden, E. & Mayer, C.-H. The Palgrave Handbook of Humour Research (second edition), pp. 129-154. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Qi, Jing, Manathunga, Catherine, Raciti, Maria & Gilbey, Kathryn 2024. Community linguascapes and epistemic linguascapes: making a case for multilingual doctoral education in Australia. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01596306.2024.2431030

News of a special publication (in French)

Sadow, Lauren, Mullan, Kerry & Béal, Christine. (eds.). 2024. Peeters, B.† Langue, culture et valeurs. Vers une ethnolinguistique appliquée et applicable (Vols 1-2). Paris: L’Harmattan.

The three editors are delighted to announce the publication of Langue, culture et valeurs. Vers une ethnolinguistique appliquée et applicable (‘Language, Culture and Values. Towards an applied and applicable ethnolinguistics’) by the late Bert Peeters (ANU). When Bert passed away in 2021, he left behind a manuscript which was 80% completed. Over the following years, the manuscript was completed, revised and edited by three of Bert’s close colleagues, and includes a preface by Anna Wierzbicka, Bert’s closest friend and collaborator. There are two volumes.

More information can be found here:

https://www.editions-harmattan.fr/catalogue/livre/langue-culture-et-valeurs-1/77665

https://www.editions-harmattan.fr/catalogue/livre/langue-culture-et-valeurs/77664

Colleagues can contact kerry.mullan@rmit.edu.au for more information and/or to obtain a 30% discount from the publisher’s quoted price.

Conference presentations

Fukuno, Maho. Quality perceptions between translators and community readers: A case of Australian public health translation. Paper presented at the APU & RMIT University Cooperative International Symposium: International cooperation among Universities and Local Governments, Japan (12 December 2024).
Fukuno, Maho. Where translators and community readers meet: Translation of public health information. Paper presented at the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators National Conference, RMIT University, Melbourne (21-22 November 2024).
Mullan, Kerry (with Nicholas Holm, Meredith Marra and Til Knowles). Blatherin’ about Blather: An interdisciplinary conversation about Comic Blather. Panel, Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference, Flinders University, Adelaide (19-21 February 2025).
Mullan, Kerry (with Diane de Saint Léger). Placemaking in air travel to the French Pacific: a semiotic assemblage in a (non)-place. Australian Society for French Studies, University of Melbourne (11-13 December 2024).
Mullan, Kerry (with Diane de Saint Léger). Translating urban spaces: short-term mobility as an opportunity for trans/formative learning in tertiary settings. Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities (LCNAU) Colloquium, University of Sydney (27-29 November 2024).

HDR completions/milestones

The following student was awarded their PhD in October 2024:

Dam, Thuy. Thesis title: “My Heart is for Vietnamese, but I think and write in English”: Identity (Re)Construction of Third Culture Kids – The Interplay between Language, Culture and Identity.

Supervisors: Kerry Mullan, Jing Qi and Chantal Crozet.

Kerry Mullan

News from Western Sydney University

Grant

New project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): Aboriginal English on Croker Island: Morphosyntactic variation between input and innovation in a new variety of English.

Rob Mailhammer and Steffi Hackert (LMU Munich) are collaborating in this 3-year fieldwork-based project that will investigate morphosyntactic variation in English on Croker Island. This work will follow up on Rob’s ARC funded project focusing explaining variation in the context of contact, language use and the typology of varieties of English.

Linguistics wins teaching and learning awards led by Stacey Sherwood

School of Humanities and Communication Arts Teaching and Learning Award for innovation, leadership, or scholarship in teaching and learning.
School of Humanities and Communication Arts Teaching and Learning Award for approaches to teaching and the support of learning that influence, motivate, and inspire students, in collaboration with Adrian Hale, Emily Rytmeister, Milena Ilisevic, Jacqueline Willis, Margot Seligmann, Lee-Sing Lau, and Santalia Dean-Johns.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Education) Award: Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning, in collaboration with Adrian Hale, Emily Rytmeister, Milena Ilisevic, Jacqueline Willis, Margot Seligmann, Lee-Sing Lau, and Santalia Dean-Johns.

Selected publications

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke, Robert Mailhammer, Brett Baker, Yizhou Wang, Mark Harvey and Chloe Turner. 2025. Lenition, fortition, and lexical access in Iwaidja and Mawng. Laboratory Phonology 16(1), 1-32

Izadi, D. & Luke, A. 2025. Dialogues of materiality: Unravelling the agency of discourse and objects. Multimodal Communication, 14 (1), 69-84.

Izadi, D. 2025. Understanding linguistic prejudice through linguistic landscapes. In J. Setter, S. Dovchin & V. A. Ramjattan, The Oxford Handbook of language and prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hackert, Stephanie, Catherine Laliberté, Robert Mailhammer, Diana Wengler & Ronia Zeidan (alphabetical ordering). 2025. Past-tense marking in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island: Implications for variation and change in English. Journal of English Linguistics 53(1), 32-62

Robert Mailhammer

News from La Trobe University

In January we farewelled Prof. James Walker and Prof. Marija Tabain. In February, we farewelled Assoc. Prof. Stephen Morey. We also welcomed two new members to the department, Dr. Gerald Roche and Dr. Jacq Jones.

Dr. Judith Bishop won the Civic Choice Award in the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her lyric essay titled 'History repeats (A tale of artificial noses)’.

Graduations
Dr. Dipjyoti Goswami completed his PhD, A Grammatical Description of Rëra Tangsa (2024), supervised by Stephen Morey, Kellen Van Dam and Lauren Gawne.

Media

Gerald Roche in The Conversation: "Tibet is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. This is in danger of extinction"

Judith Bishop in The Conversation: "Erotica, gore and racism: how America’s war on ‘ideological bias’ is letting AI off the leash”

Jess Kruk and Lauren Gawne in The Conversation: "Adolescence has sparked fears over teen slang – but emoji don’t cause radicalisation"

Gerald Roche on Language on the Move

Gerald Roche on The Vocal Fries

Lingthusiasm celebrated 100 episodes: https://lingthusiasm.com/episodes

Recent publications - books

Gawne, Lauren. (2025). Gesture: A Slim Guide. Oxford University Press.

Roche, Gerald. (2024). The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Cornell University Press.

Recent publications - articles

Roche, Gerald (2025). Securing the right to assimilate: How the drafting of the genocide convention helped undermine language rights. Ethnicities, 25(1), 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968241298312

Roche, Gerald (2024). “Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language”: Language Revitalization, Reactionary Settler Colonialism, and Perpetual Genocide. Genocide Studies International, (aop), e20240011. https://doi.org/10.3138/GSI-2024-0011

Roche, Gerald (2024). We need a global language rights movement: confronting the global language crisis with insights from social movement studies. Global Social Challenges Journal, 1(aop), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2024D000000029

McCulloch, Gretchen & Gawne, Lauren (2024). Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm. Linguistics Vanguard, 10(s3), 181-189. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0073

Lauren Gawne

News from University of Melbourne

Thesis submission

Angelo Dian - “An acoustic phonetic analysis of the long-short consonant contrast in Italian obstruents across three regional varieties”, supervised by John Hajek and Janet Fletcher.

Some results have been recently published in the open-access journal, Languages: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/9/12/383

This thesis investigates how Italian speakers from different regions produce single and double consonants in pairs such as fato ‘fate’ vs. fatto ‘fact’. While this length contrast is well documented in more standard-like varieties like Roman Italian, I also focus on how it plays out in two under-researched varieties: Veneto and Calabrian Italian. I show that single consonants between vowels are often pronounced more weakly and with shorter duration in Roman and Calabrian Italian — a process known as lenition — while double consonants tend to resist this weakening and remain ‘strong’ cross-regionally, with however regional variation in the phonetic expression of strength. Uniquely, Veneto Italian also associates phonemic voicelessness (as in t vs. d) with strength, producing single voiceless consonants with considerably longer duration, which reduces the length contrast for voiceless consonants. This kind of voicing-strength interaction is more typical of so-called ‘aspirating’ languages such as English, and has not been previously investigated for a language like Italian. The research is innovative in this respect, as it sheds light on how consonant length and strength interact in this language, revealing region-specific patterns that haven’t been described before.

Article publication

Bundgaard-Nielsen, R. L., Mailhammer, R., Baker, B., Wang, Y., Harvey, M. & Turner, C., (2025) “Lenition, fortition, and lexical access in Iwaidja and Mawng”, Laboratory Phonology 16(1).

doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.15347

Many models of word recognition assume that spoken words are faithful to their phonological shape in the lexicon and that word recognition begins with the first incoming segment and proceeds linearly. Some languages, however, including Mawng and Iwaidja (Australia), exhibit alternations in word-initial segments, rendering these segments potentially unreliable. We tested the effect of word-initial segmental variability in Mawng and Iwaidja in a Two-Alternate Forced Choice experiment which paired canonical productions of nouns with forms beginning with both attested and non-attested variant onsets. All participants preferred canonical forms, but Mawng speakers were tolerant of /ɡ/-initial lenition. Results demonstrate that speakers prefer input consistent with the lexical specifications. Variance is only tolerated when phonetic/phonological deviance does not compromise native phonological and phonetic boundaries. The results highlight the importance of language-specific lexicon-phonology-phonetics interfaces in word-recognition and may guide developments in models of continuous parsing regarding the question of the nature of the input.

Helen Fraser

News from UTS (University of Technology Sydney)

Events:

We have initiated regular Social Sociolinguistics discussions on campus. Contact Alex Grey if you work at UTS and would like to join us.

Guest lecture from Dr Adrian Hemler: Law and Corpus Linguistics – Current Trends and Future Application, 1 April 2025. Session recording available soon on Language on the Move.

Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers Network (LLIRN) 6th Anniversary Workshop, 14 April 2025. Report forthcoming.

NTROs:

Emma Genovese (10 Feb 2025) ‘Language and Inclusion in Law’ [#3, LLIRN About Us series], Language on the Move

Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin (2025). Making Zhuang Language Visible [Video and teaching notes]

Kristen Martin (20 Feb 2025), ‘Strengthening Indigenous languages: an update’, UTS News

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (Interview, 1 January 2025)

‘How does multilingual law-making work?: A discussion with Karen McAuliffe’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (Interview, 4 March 2025)

'Can ethnic minority languages co-exist with Mandarin in China?' [Interview with Dr Alexandra Grey and Dr Lajiadou] Ear to Asia Podcast, University of Melbourne (Interview, 26 March 2025)

Peer-reviewed articles:

Grey, A. (2025) China’s official common language gains further strength against minority languages. Melbourne Asia Review issue 21.1 (中文: 中国的官方通用语言面对少数民族语言的优势更为显著)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings, (6 November 2024) University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies

Alexandra Grey

News from Griffith University

The linguists at Griffith have been busy planning for ALS2025, which is being held at our Gold Coast campus in early December, and preparing for Panels at International Pragmatics Conference Brisbane in June, hosted by University of Queensland. We also have an amended degree program rolling out for the Bachelor of Languages and Linguistics.

Cliff Goddard enjoyed an 8-week Visiting Professorship at Aarhus University, Denmark (Sept-Oct 2024), where he collaborated with the large “Danish in the Making” project. He continues to work on the “Building Blocks of Meaning” project, which is winding up this year. Helen Bromhead continues to work with the NHMRC-funded “Strengthening Emergency Engagement and Communication” (SEEC) project, headquarted at UNSW, and to research in the climate and disaster messaging space. Susana Eisenchlas is co-leading a transnational study into what influences parental decisions on language transmission. Gerry Docherty has been on study leave as he transitions from Dean Research to a normal Professorial role in Linguistics.

In other news, we are pleased that Dr. Reza Arab has a new position at University of Queenland, and Lissara Bergamaschi (Hons student) is working as linguist with Central Queensland Language Centre, Bundaberg.

Publications

Bromhead, Helen. 2024. Planet in danger! Climate emotions in English: A cultural pragmatics study of eco-anxiety, grief and distress (pp. 158-174). In Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bromhead, H. 2024. Names for weather disasters in Australia. Problems of Onomastics, 21(3), 250-263. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2024.21.3.041

Goddard, Cliff. 2024. ‘Long’, ‘flat’, ‘round’, ‘hard’, ‘heavy’, ‘sharp’: Basic conceptual building blocks in the realm of the physical. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 11(2), 251-275.

Hane, Amie A., Robert J. Ludwig, Amy G. Martinez, Cynthia Masese, Ulla Vanhatalo, Cliff Goddard, Marc E. Jaffe, Michael M. Myers, and Martha G. Welch. 2024. Translation, cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the universal Welch Emotional Connection Screen using primary and bilingual Spanish-speaking coders of videotaped mother-child interaction. Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 26 August 2024 (section Developmental Psychopathology and Mental Health). Volume 3 - 2024 https://doi.org/10.3389/frcha.2024.1346121

Goddard, Cliff. 2025. The conceptual building blocks of kinship terminologies. Lingua Volume 313, 103841 Open Access https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103841.

Goddard, Cliff, Zhengdao Ye and Tine Junker. 2024. Security, Ānquán, Sicherheit: Similar-but-different key concepts in English, Chinese, and German. In Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic Perspectives, pp. 217-235. John Benjamins.

Kawabata, D. and B. Fenton-Smith. 2024. Incoherent coherence? Using systemic functional linguistics to improve oral language assessment literacy. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. doi.org/10.1007/s44020-024-00073-7

Rarrick, Samantha. 2025. Mouthings in highly multilingual contexts: typological implications from Hawai‘i Sign Language and Sinasina Sign Language. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism: 1-25.

Rarrick, Samantha. 2025. Bridging Signed Language Documentation & Spoken Language Documentation. Language Documentation & Conservation 19: 24-39.

Rarrick, Samantha and Reza Arab. 2025. "Contextual clips: Prioritizing neglected recordings in corpora." Language Documentation & Conservation 19: 67-81.

Stollznow, Karen. 2025. Bitch: The Journey of a Word. Cambridge University Press. (Karen is an Adjunct Research Fellow)

Taboada, Maite, Cliff Goddard and Rada Trnavac. 2025. ‘Adverb-ly adjective’ combinations in English: Classification, semantics, and discourse functions. English Language and Linguistics, 29(1): 102 - 131| Opeen Access | doi:10.1017/S136067432400008X

Cliff Goddard

News from the Australian National University (ANU)

HDR News

Congratulations to Dr Lesley Woods on the completion of her doctoral thesis, , "Reawakening Wangaaypuwan and A Plain Language Grammar", https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733736957

Congratulations to Laura Chien, PhD Candidate with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care, who has been awarded a fellowship from the US Institute for Healthcare Improvement. As part of the fellowship, Laura will complete a 14-month program focused on safety, quality improvement and leadership, enhancing her ability to translate research findings on navigating diagnostic uncertainty in emergency care into practical strategies for patients, caregivers and clinicians.

SLLL and CHL welcome the following PhD students who commented in 2025: Benjamin Purser, working on “Dialect coherence and mechanisms of sound change in Australian English: identifying co-variation of speech features in regional and urban Australian speakers” (supervisor: Catherine Travis); Blake Askelin, working on 'Exploring Patient Experiences of Heart Failure in Australia: A Snapshot of Patient Challenges and Communication' (Supervisor: Diana Slade); Yuchen Li, working on a grammar of Mandailing Batak (part of Wayan Arka’s ARC-funded project on the Barrier Islands languages of Sumatra; supervisor: Wayan Arka); Marcelinus F. Akoli, working on Sikule, a minority language spoken at the northern tip of Simeulue Island, the northernmost of the Barrier Islands (part of Wayan Arka’s ARC-funded project; supervisor: Wayan Arka; Michael Lambropoulos, on a project "Application of Band-Limited Cepstrum to Linguistic-Phonetic Studies: Exploring Advanced Insights" (Supervisor: Shun Ishihara).

Awards

Congratulations to SLLL Honorary Affliate, Dr Hilary Smith, on being awarded Membership in the New Zealand Order of Merit, in the New Year Honours List 2025 https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/honours/lists/ny2025-mnzm#smithhi

For services to linguistics and the community

Dr Hilary Smith has been involved with Volunteer Service Abroad Te Tuāo Tāwāhi (VSA) for more than 40 years.

Dr Smith made contributions for more than seven years as a VSA teacher and teacher educator in Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and Laos. She served as the Chair of the VSA Council between 1998 and 2007, has been a member of the VSA Appointments Panel, and has chaired local interest groups in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Te Papaiōea Palmerston North. She was President of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Aotearoa New Zealand between 2008 and 2015, currently Chairs Applied Linguistics in Aotearoa New Zealand (ALANZ), and co-convenes the Languages Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand. Through her career in applied linguistics, she has supported numerous countries as a teacher and leader; these include Nepal, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and Fiji. Dr Smith has been working with the Gamilaraay Aboriginal community in New South Wales, Australia to support Gamilaraay language revival, resulting in the production of resources including multimedia materials and the first bilingual early reading books.

ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH):

Congratulations to Georgia Carr, a researcher from the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH), whose first book ‘The Language of Sex Education’ has just been published by Bloomsbury Academic. Book available here. The Language of Sex Education offers a deep dive into sex education pedagogy in the Australian context, taking a close look at the language used to teach the key topics of consent and respect.

It examines questions students ask, how teachers accommodate different beliefs in their classrooms, and how students learn about more values-based topics including consent, respectful relationships, and gender and sexuality diversity. It also considers what teaching and assessment looks like over the course of a school term and what makes a 'successful' student. In short it answers the question – how is sex education actually taught?

The Language of Sex Education provides the first book-length treatment of the language of sex education, offering a detailed account of pedagogy from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The study is situated in the Australian context, though has broader relevance to places such as New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom whose sex education is historically and culturally comparable to that of Australia.

Publications

Barth, Danielle, Nicholas Evans, Sonja Gipper, Stefan Schnell, Henrik Bergqvist, Menguistu Amberber, I Wayan Arka, Christian Döhler, Diana Forker, Volker Gast, Dolgor Guntsetseg, Gabrielle Hodge, Eri Kashima, Yukinori Kimoto, Norikazu Kogura, Dominique Knuchel, Inge Kral, Keita Kurabe, John Mansfield, Heiko Narrog, Desak Putu Eka Pratiwi, Hiroki Nomoto, Seongha Rhee, Alan Rumsey, Lila San Roque, Andrea C. Schalley, Asako Shiohara, Elena Skribnik, Olena Tykhostup, Saskia van Putten, and Yanti. (2024.) The Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC) Project Guidelines. In Danielle Barth and Nicholas Evans (Eds), Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC) (Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 12). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 163–237. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/74790

Barth, D. & Evans, N. (2024). SCOPIC 1.0 corpus files. SocCog-corp01 at catalog.paradisec.org.au. https://dx.doi.org/10.26278/1YH7-J821

Barth, D. & Ross, M. (2024). Clause chaining in Matukar Panau (Oceanic). In H. Sarvasy & A. Aikhenvald, Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World (pp. 276-305). Oxford University Press.

Carr, G. (2025). The Language of Sex Education: With Respect to Consent. London/New York/Dublin: Bloomsbury.

Dahm, M. R., Chien, L. J., Morris, J., Lutze, L., Scanlan, S., & Crock, C. (2024). Addressing diagnostic uncertainty and excellence in emergency care—from multicountry policy analysis to communication practice in Australian emergency departments: a multimethod study protocol. BMJ open, 14(9), e085335. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2024-085335

Davey, Janet. (2024). Taking “TA” beyond the binary: In search of multimodal gender-inclusive pronouns in Chinese. Image [&] Narrative, 25(3).

Evans, Nicholas. 2024. Lexical reconstruction and the evolution of yam gardening in Southern New Guinea. In 言語記述研究会 (eds.) Festschrift for Professor Toshiki Osada, pp. 187-202. ISSN 2432-244X

Evans, Nicholas. 2025. Philologie typologique. Annuaire de l'École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Section des sciences historiques et philologiques [on line], 156 | 2025, [2/4/2025]. http://journals.openedition.org/ashp/7825 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13mss

Keith, Emma and Yuko Kinoshita (2025). Sub-band parametric ceptstral distance measurement of voiceless alveolar fricative segments as a tool for identifying speaker-characteristic information robust to emotional variation. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 31 (2)

Kimoto, Yukinori, Asako Shiohara, Danielle Barth, Nicholas Evans, Norikazu Kogura, I Wayan Arka, Desak Putu Eka Pratiwi, Yuki Kasuga, Carine Kawakami, Keita Kurabe, Heiko Narrog, Hiroki Nomoto, Hitomi Ono, Alan Rumsey, Andrea C. Schalley, Yanti, Akiko Yokoyama. (2024). Syntactic embedding or parataxis? Corpus-based typology of complementation in language use. In D. Barth & N. Evans (Eds.), LD&C Special Publication No. 12: The Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC): A Cross-linguistic Resource, 126-162. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24745

Gnevsheva, Ksenia, Heba, Bou Orm, & and Travis, Catherine E. (2025). Assessing language-based discrimination in Australia: The effect of speaker accent in employability judgements. Australian Journal of Linguistics:1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2025.2453927.

McMillan-Major, A. De Toni, F. et al (2024). Documenting geographically and contextually diverse language data sources. NEJLT – Northern European Journal of Language Technology, 10(1).

Pramartha, C., I W Arka, I. B. A. I. Iswara, I. W. Supriana, G. A. V. M. Giri, and I. K. G. Suhartana. 2024. "Balinese Script Keyboard for Mobile Devices: Enhancing Digital Accessibility and Cultural Preservation." Proceeding International Conference on Information Technology, Multimedia, Architecture, Design, and E-Business.

Pramartha, C., G. D. D. Saputra, I. W. Supriana, I. G. N. A. C. Putra, I W. Arka, and M. A. Raharja. 2024. " Enabling Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Semantic Web Prototype for Digitizing and Documenting Balinese Woven Fabric Artifacts. ." Proceedings of the First International Conference on Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing (ICAMSAC 2023

Rajeg, G. P. W., Hemmings, C., Sangian, E. Z., Wijaya, D., & Arka, I. W. (with Milson Kaitora, Harun Kaharubi, M. Raflizen Kaitora (alm.), Aron Kaitora (alm.), Johansen Kaharubi, Ishar Timius Kaitora, Marlansius Kaharubi, Adam Kurniawan Kauno, & Resiawati Kaitora). (2025). Kamus Bahasa Enggano (1st ed.). University of Oxford & Zara Abadi; University of Oxford’s Sustainable Digital Scholarship. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28022312.

Rajeg, G. P. W., Hemmings, C., Pramartha, C. R. A., Sangian, E. Z., Wijaya, D., Ogilvie, S., Krauße, D., Arka, I. W., Dalrymple, M., Nothofer, B., Artanta Wibawa, P. W., Kusuma, P. A. D., Mahardika Adi Putra, I. P. G., & Gotra, A. A. N. M. A. (bekerja sama dengan Milson Kaitora, Harun Kaharubi, M. Raflizen Kaitora (alm.), Aron Kaitora (alm.), Johansen Kaharubi, Ishar Timius Kaitora, Marlansius Kaharubi, Adam Kurniawan Kauno, & Resiawati Kaitora). (2025). Kamus Digital Bahasa Enggano. University of Oxford & Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on the Humanities and Social Sciences (CIRHSS), Udayana University; University of Oxford’s Sustainable Digital Scholarship. https://enggano.cirhss.org/ https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28188665.

Sam Passmore, Birgit Hellwig, Rowena Garcia, Evan Kidd; The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition. Open Mind 2025; 9 501–514. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00199

Sangian, Engga Zakaria; Hemmings, Charlotte; Arono, Arono; Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya; Arka, I Wayan (2024). Pihia' Yic Enggano VII. University of Oxford & Zara Abadi. Book. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28233557

Weiss, Maya, Gnevsheva, Ksenia, Travis, Catherine E., & Docherty, Gerard. (2024). Application of ASR to a sociolinguistic corpus of Australian English In O. Maxwell & R. Bundgaard-Nielsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 27-31): Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Wijaya, Dendi; Sangian, Engga Zakaria; Hemmings, Charlotte; Arka, I Wayan (2024). Bahan Ajar Enggano: Bangga Menjadi Anak Enggano: Kapa Dop Enggano. University of Oxford & Zara Abadi. Book. https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.28233371

Wierzbicka, Anna (2024). “Eternal Life”, “Eternal Punishment”: What Did Jesus Really Mean?. Cognitive Semantics, 10(3), 297-326.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2024) (ed.) Special issue on Cognitive Semantics in Religion. Cognitive Semantics, 10 (3).

Public Writing

Davey, Janet. (2025, March 17). Chinese only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s: Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one. The Conversation.
Francesco De Toni. How can digital scribes improve healthcare? Hard-learnt lessons from a trial at SMHS. https://www.pulseit.news/australian-digital-health/opinion-how-can-digital-scribes-improve-healthcare-hard-learnt-lessons-from-a-trial-at-smhs/
Mary Dahm, Laura Chien & Consumer Reference Group (GRC). What a difference consumers make.

Paper Presentations

Arka, I Wayan. 2024. "Attrition of Symmetricality in the Austronesian Voice System: Insights from Indonesia's Barrier Islands Languages and Beyond." 15th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT XV), NTU Singapore, 4-6 December 2024.
Ganggo Ate, Yustinus , and I Wayan Arka. 2024. "Affectedness in Kodhi: The Dynamic Interplay between Lexical and Grammatical Aspect." The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), Australian National University, 26-29 November 2024.
Lindsay, George, and I Wayan Arka. 2024. "Usage versus cognition in language structure formation: Evidence from the verbal complex in Marori." The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), Australian National University, 26-29 November 2024
Myer, Anneke 2024. “Two-way learning, respect and collaboration”, joint presentation with Aboriginal Interpreting WA (AIWA), 22 November 2024 at 37th National AUSIT Conference: Linguistic equity and access: translating and interpreting – Connecting our communities and the world, (Melbourne, 21–23 November).
Myer, Anneke. 2024. “Parliamentary transcription as an accessibility measure”, invited spot during ‘Transcription theory and practice’ themed session led by Helen Fraser and Eleanor Kettle, 27 November 2024, at ALS 2024, annual conference of the Australian Linguistics Society (Canberra, 26–29 November).
Pramartha, C., G. P. W. Rajeg, M. Dalrymple, and I. W. Arka. 2024. " Preserving the Enggano Language: A Digital Dictionary Approach." Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2024, Canberra, Australia
Rajeg, Gede P. , C. Hemmings, I Wayan Arka, and Engga Z. Sangian. 2024. "Enggano Middle Voice and Valence Over Time." 15th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT XV) NTU, Singapore, 4-6 December 2024

News/Media

Ksenia Gnevsheva has been interviewed for ABC radio and SBS News (Maria is one of many women with a foreign accent facing a 'double disadvantage’ in the workforce)

Neda Krimi’s research on alignment between patients and doctors in inflammatory bowel disease, and the communication practices that foster such alignment, published in Patient Education and Counseling, has garnered attention from multiple media outlets. Highlights include:

An interview with 666 ABC Canberra's Afternoons program
An interview with HealthCentral.com
Coverage in news platforms such as Medical Xpress, The National Tribune, and Mirage News
Recognition by Crohn’s & Colitis Australia

Conferences

ANU will be hosting COOL13, the 13^th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics, from June 23-27 this year. Please check the conference website for further information, including registration:

https://chl.anu.edu.au/event/cool13-13th-conference-oceanic-linguistics

Grants/Postdocs

Dr Adam Tallman (Jena) has received an ERC Horizon Grant for his project 'Sociolinguistic Patterns and multi-lingual interactions on the Pahoturi River' and will be spending around 12 months of this project at the ANU from mid-2026.

Fieldwork

Figure 1: Emma with a Sipora Mentawai Speaker

Emma Keith is currently on a major fieldwork trip to Sipora island, collecting research data in the form of language elicitation and videos in the Sipora dialect of Mentawai. She is accompanied by research assistant Sumario Tatubeket, a native Sipora Mentawai speaker, who is collecting videos from around Sipora island to be part of their growing corpus of spoken Mentawai. Both are based in Tuapeijat, making shorter trips to outlying trips to other towns in Sipora, and occasionally to other islands and the Sumatran mainland, to collect videos and elicitation. The growing video corpus, which began last year taking in the Mentawai dialects of Sipora, Sabirut, and Rereiket, is now focussing on Sipora; all major settlements in Sipora have now contributed at least some data, which should assist in providing an accurate view of variation and similarity within Sipora Mentawai. Emma’s PhD grammar-writing project, initially hoping to describe Mentawai as a whole, has pivoted towards focussing on the Sipora dialect as a result of the high degree of divergence observed between the dialects; the change in course of the corpus data collection reflects this.

Wayan Arka and Zhengdao Ye

News from the Jawun Research Centre, Central Queensland University

In early 2025, the former Jawun Research Centre was upgraded to the Jawun Research Institute. The new Director of the Institute is Professor Yvonne Cadet-James, a long-term colleague of ours. Linguistics in Cairns continues thriving within the Guwal Language, Culture, and Well-being Research Cluster in the Jawun Research Institute. The Research Cluster is jointly led by Professor Adrian Miller, Deputy Vice-President Indigenous Engagement and Member of the Jirrbal nation, and Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Our current focus is on the role of language and culture in enhancing the well-being of disadvantaged minority groups, and on development of new ways of speaking across endangered minority languages across the tropics. This is reflected in numerous publications, seminar series, presentations, and outreach activities, on-going and planned.

The research team under the leadership of Professor Adrian Miller (with participation of Ruth Miller, CEO of the Jirrbal Aboriginal Corporation, educator, expert in indigenous knowledge, language, and culture, Professor R. M. W. Dixon, and Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald) completed work on a Priority Languages Support Grant by First Languages Australia (2023-2024), towards the implementation of Jirrbal language in schools in North Queensland (focus on Ravenshoe State School), planning further applications in this area.

Staff news

Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald finished overseeing the production process of her new book A guide to gender and classifiers (published in March 2025, Oxford University Press, Oxford). She is currently working on a larger monograph Noun categorization: a comprehensive typology, to be published later this year, and finalising a comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea (c. 150,000 words). She is also working on a monograph provisionally entitled Versatile morphology: person marking and affixation in Arawak languages. Jointly with Dr Gülshen Sakhatova (University of Cyprus, Nicosia), she is preparing for publication an edited volume Do ghosts dream? Evidentiality and the supranatural across languages and cultures. She is responsible for organising the Multidisciplinary Seminar Series ‘Communication, health, and social and cultural well-being’, and, jointly with Dr Lydia Mainey (CQU), for coordinating the new Seminar Series ‘The Cairns Research Think-Tank’ (CRITTERs), and jointly with Professor Rosita Henry (CQU/JCU), seminars within the ‘Cairns Linguistic and Anthropology Seminar series’ (CLASS) at Jawun Research Institute.

She continues performing her duties as the first-named editor of the series Brill's studies in language, cognition, and culture (in addition to numerous other editorial responsibilities, podcasts, and interviews). Alexandra continues her work with the extant speakers of the Wamiarikune dialect of Tariana in Iauaretê and São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas, Brazil) and also Gramado (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), providing materials for the Tariana school Enu Irine Idakini (‘Children of the Blood of Thunder’) in Iauaretê. She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. She also chairs the Nominations Committee in the Jawun Research Institutes. She continues her work as Etymology consultant for South American languages, for Oxford English Dictionary (c. 2 entries a month). One of her recent podcasts dealing with the importance of oral literature, recorded by Vanessa Rogers at Fabric of Folklore website is at https://www.buzzsprout.com/2291423/episodes/16481462 and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO9ATJgTAQQ&feature=youtu.be

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 language in the Caribbean encountered by Columbus in 1492). Her most recent meeting with members of the Taino Revival movement on 27 December 2024, is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6N5K0cbLkU)

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

• 'Becoming an albino: fieldwork in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea', 25-26 November 2024, RAN Academy of Sciences.
• 'Possession and beyond: an Amazonian angle', University of Warsaw/University of Cologne, 17 January 2025. Workshop 'Exploring Possession across Indigenous South and Central America'.
• ‘Dare to be different: linguistic diversity and change in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea’. A plenary address at the 47^th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Germany, University of Mainz, 5 March 2025
• ‘Navigating knowledge: the ways of speaking and the dynamics of information source’. A plenary address at the Workshop ‘Linguistic variation and change meet anthropology: Investigating ways of speaking in cultural contexts’. Convened by Dr. Svenja Völkel & Prof. Nico Nassenstein (JGU Mainz), 5 March 2025.
• ‘Evidentiality and social action: language ecology, cognition, and change’, 'Evidentiality in the languages of Asia', 14-16 November 2025, University of Macao.
• 'The world through the prism of language: what are gender and classifiers good for?', 12 November 2025, University of Macao (a general lecture).

Mainz, Johannes Gütenberg University, 6 March 2025, Workshop ‘‘Linguistic variation and change meet anthropology: Investigating ways of speaking in cultural contexts’: left to right: Svenja Völkel, Alexandra Aikhenvald, James Slotta, Nico Nassenstein, at the back: Adam Glaz, and Carsten Levisen.

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is continuing his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendents of the Yidinji speakers, providing information and advice on introducing original Dyirbal language concepts and terminology within the framework of Indigenous Engagement and First Nations Research at CQUniversity, as a priority within the Jawun Research institute. His new monograph The anatomy of avoidance: A full story of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal 'mother-in-law language'. This is coming out in 2025, from DeGruyterBrill. It has a foreword by Professor Adrian Miller, a proud member of the Jirrbal nation. Bob recently celebrated sixty years of work on the languages of the Cairns rainforest region in North Queensland. Besides Dyirbal, he was able to do considerable work on Yidiny, and as much as was then possible with the speakers of Warrgamay, Nyawaygi, and Mbabaram. He published grammars and vocabularies of these four languages which the descendants of the speakers he worked with are utilising in order to regain something of their cultural heritage.

Bob’s essay The eternal and the ephemeral was published in the edited volume Language in strange and familiar places. He is now working on a historical survey of comparative work on Australian languages, trying to distinguish between sound work and speculation. He is also writing an essay on the nature of grammars, relating in large part to his two grammars of Dyirbal (1972) and (2022).

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

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

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

Christoph Holz with the Konomala people (Danfu village, New Ireland, PNG) at his initiation ceremony into the Soklo (Small Bird) clan, where they metaphorically 'broke his legs' (sai piti fána) - making him part of the community so he couldn't walk away.

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

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

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

Visiting scholars in 2025

Dr Katarzyna I. Wojtylak (PhD James Cook University summa cum laude, 2017) is a Research Fellow at the University of Warsaw and an expert on Witotoan languages and other languages of Colombian Amazon within the Caquetá-Putumayo River Basin. She spent five weeks as a Visiting Fellow at the Jawun Research Institute in February-March 2025 working on language contact across Amazonia and issues in fieldwork with minority languages, in collaboration with Professors Aikhenvald and Dixon, in addition to a joint paper with Aikhenvald on the origins of terms for coca, tobacco, and snuff across the languages of Caquetá-Putumayo and the adjacent Vaupés River Basin area. On 19.02.2025, she presented a special seminar Hidden Patterns: The Linguistic Landscape of Northwest Amazonia, followed by a Panel discussion with participation of Dr Hannah Sarvasy, Professor Rosita Henry and others.

The abstract of the talk is as follows: Northwest Amazonia is one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions, where languages from distinct families intertwine through centuries of multilingual interaction. The Caquetá-Putumayo area stands out as a vibrant hub of linguistic convergence, shaped by sustained cultural exchange and social mobility. This talk delves into the languages of this region, exploring how contact and coexistence among diverse communities have influenced their grammatical structures and linguistic identities. Through an analysis of shared patterns and unique innovations, it reveals the powerful role of multilingualism in shaping language evolution. By situating the Caquetá-Putumayo region within the broader context of Northwest Amazonia, this study offers fresh insights into the intricate relationship between language, culture, and society, inviting a deeper appreciation of the dynamics that sustain linguistic diversity in South America.

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

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

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. A guide to gender and classifiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., Anne Storch and Viveka Vellupilai. eds. 2025. Language in strange and familiar places. Linguistic Research in Uncharted Territories. Berlin: De Gruyter/Mouton.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. 'Clause chains in language history and in language contact', pp. 97-125 of Clause chaining in the languages of the world, edited by Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. 'Clause-chaining in Ndu languages', pp. 149-86 of Clause chaining in the world's languages, edited by Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. ‘The world through the prism of meaning: noun categorization devices and the ecology of language’, pp. 78-94 of Aportes disciplinares SAEL, edited by María Mare Gonzalo Espinosa. available at Libros Digitales – Sociedad Argentina de Estudios Lingüísticos; Biblioteca Digital de la Facultad de Lenguas. Universidad Nacional del Comahue

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

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2025. ‘Hidden landscapes and the images of the “unseen”: from north-west Amazonia to the Middle Sepik region of New Guina, pp. 75-130 of Language in strange and familiar places, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, and Viveka Vellupilai. Berlin: DeGruyter/Mouton.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y: 2025. ‘Lingvistički rasizam najgori je neprijatelj ugroženih i manjinskih jezika’, pp. 81-98 of Halid Bulić (ed.) TRAGANJE I TRAJANJE U JEZIKU: LINGVAZINOVI INTERVJUI. Tuzla: Institut za bosanski jezik i književnost.

Dixon, R. M. W. 2024. ‘The eternal and the ephemeral’, pp. 9-39 of Language in strange and familiar places, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, and Viveka Vellupilai. Berlin: DeGruyter/Mouton.

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

Holz, Christoph. 2024. Documentation of Konomala. Endangered Languages Archive. (https://www.elararchive.org/dk0759)

Mélac, Eric, Nicolas Tournadre and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. 2025. ‘Speaking about oneself in multi-term evidential systems: from the Himalayas to Amazonia, pp. 149-192 of Language in strange and familiar places, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, and Viveka Vellupilai. Berlin: DeGruyter/Mouton.

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. A Linguistic Ethnography of Endangered Languages in China: Chiayi Tsou. Beijing: The Commercial Press. (Included in the “14th Five-Year Plan” National Key Book Publishing Project and selected as one of The Commercial Press’s Top Ten Academic Books of 2024.)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. A review of the research on Taiwanese Southern Min since the 21st century. In Fu, Ailan and Jian Zhou, (eds.), Chao Ping Liangan Kuo: Proceedings of the 12th Cross-Strait Symposium on Modern Chinese Language Issues. Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Company, pp. 276-298. (in Chinese)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. Saaroa. In: Zeitoun, Elizabeth and Rik De Busser. (eds.) Handbook of Formosan Languages: The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan. Brill, Amsterdam.

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

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. A review of ‘Commands: a cross-linguistic typology’, by Alexandra Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon. Asian Languages and Linguistics 5.2:358–369. (ESCI)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. Some thoughts on the fieldwork in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan. Essays on Linguistics Vol.4: 95-101. (CSSCI) (in Chinese)

Pan, Chia-Jung. 2024. A Review of ‘English Prepositions’, by R.M.W. Dixon. Journal of Changshu Institute of Technology 38(6): 85-92. (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, & Chao, Der-lin (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Sociopolitical Context of Language Learning. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Sarvasy, Hannah S. and Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. eds. 2024. Clause chaining in the world’s languages, edited by Hannah Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sarvasy, Hannah S. and Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. 'Clause-chaining', pp. 1-40 of Clause chaining in the world's languages, edited by Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford University Press.

Storch, Anne, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, and Viveka Vellupilai. 2025. ‘Language in strange and familiar places: an Introduction’, pp. 1-8 of Language in strange and familiar places, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, and Viveka Vellupilai. Berlin: DeGruyter/Mouton.

Featured publications

Clause-chaining in the languages of the world

edited by Hannah S. Sarvasy and A. Y. Aikhenvald, Oxford University Press, https://academic.oup.com/book/59261; 2024, online 2025; https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198870319.001.0001

The ways of describing events and putting sentences together vary across the languages of the world. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, whose order reflects the sequence of sub-events. Clause chaining is a feature of the grammars of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, in East Africa, across Central Asia, and in the Americas. This volume aims at providing a state-of-the art view of clause chaining across continents in its various guises. Special focus is on the analysis of clause chains in the world’s languages within a typological perspective, contributing to the appreciation of linguistic diversity. The introductory chapter features a discussion of typological properties of clause chaining with a brief guide for fieldworkers. Each of the 29 chapters focuses on a topic, a linguistic area, a language family, or a single language, within the domain of clause chains and clause combining.

A guide to gender and classifiers

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford University Press, March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198863601.001.0001; https://academic.oup.com/book/59732

Almost all languages of the world have noun categorization devices in their grammar. The most widespread is linguistic gender—grammatical classes of nouns based on core semantic properties such as sex (female and male), animacy, humanness, and also shape and size. Numeral classifiers categorize the noun in terms of its inherent nature, animacy, shape and form, and occur next to a numeral or a quantifier. Further types include noun classifiers, possessive classifiers, verbal classifiers, and a number of rarer types (locative and deictic classifiers). Gender and various types of classifiers share discourse functions, and are hardly ever semantically redundant. Gender and classifiers can refer anaphorically to a previously mentioned entity and serve as referent-tracking devices. They change as the society changes, reflecting the ways in which language and social environment are integrated with one another. The meanings, and the uses, of noun categorization devices offer unique insights into human cognition.

The anatomy of avoidance. A Full Study of Jalnguy, the Dyirbal 'Mother-in-Law Language

R. M. W. Dixon

Berlin: DeGruyter/Bril, 2025

Speakers of Dyirbal in North Queensland, Australia, have an everyday language style which has been well described. They also have an avoidance style, called Jalnguy, which must be used in the presence of certain ‘tabooed kin’ such as the mother-in-law. Jalnguy has the same grammar and phonology as the everyday style, but the vocabularies are entirely different. Jalnguy has only about one-sixth as many lexemes as the everyday style, with various techniques used to create a Jalnguy correspondent for each everyday style word. The underlying semantic system of Dyirbal is thus realised at two levels of generality and is revealed through detailed study of the correspondences between them. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of this in-law avoidance language, providing fascinating new insights into register variation and the complexities of kinship in Australian languages.

Language in strange and familiar places: Linguistic Research in Uncharted Territories

edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, and Vuiveka Vellupilai

Berlin: DeGruyterBrill

Language and place are intimately connected: depending on where we are, what the context is and what our aims are, we will adjust our language accordingly. Yet linguistics defines itself by a framework that determines which kind of language is worth investigating. Within that framework, linguistics constructs both language and place in multiple ways: language as a sequestered thing belongs to the field site or the classroom; language as fluid practice is associated with the street; language as reconstruction belongs to migration corridors. What about the places that tend to fall between the cracks? This volume explores language in strange and familiar places, from Europe to Africa, Amazonia, Australia and the Pacific, in order to shed light on them.

Upcoming events (Multidisciplinary Seminar Series)

Multidisciplinary Seminar Series

Communication, health, and social and cultural well-BEING

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

Seminars take place on Wednesdays, 3pm – 5 pm Qld time, face-to-face CQUniversity, CBD Cairns, Corner Abbott Street and Shield Street (room 3.06, The Boardroom), or zoom.

Upcoming seminars

Wednesday 16 April Dr Fiona Wirrer-George First Nations Methodologies and Creative Practice - The Call of Lineage - A Living Epistemology https://cqu.zoom.us/s/83523852522, passcode 131217

Wednesday 7 May Joann Schmider Looking to advance Wet Tropics Rainforest Country Interests https://cqu.zoom.us/s/81508508480, passcode 814337

Monday 30 June Professor Haiping Long Clause-medial development and positional shifts of subjective adverbials, https://cqu.zoom.us/s/81073927009, passcode 709439

Wednesday 2 July Professor Tim Carey Why Settle For Equity: What is health for?https://cqu.zoom.us/s/86944061826,passcode 799010

More coming up— watch this space!

For further information contact Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald (Sasha) at a.aikhenvald@cqu.edu.au phone: 0400 305 315; see also https://www.cqu.edu.au/research/organisations/jawun-research-centre

Expressions of interest to present a talk in the series on topics in linguistic anthropology and/or anthropological linguistics within the Jawun Seminar series or CLASS (Cairns Linguistics and Anthropology Seminar Series), convened by Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and Professor Rosita Henry can be sent to Alexandra at a.aikhenvald@cqu.edu.au or a.y.aikhenvald@live.com.

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages (ACAL)

Staff update

ACAL welcomed three new staff in the period:

Henry Leslie-O’Neill: Henry is also a PhD candidate at the Australian National University (ANU), investigating the process of co-designing language learning materials for revitalising languages. They recently returned to Canberra after two years in Kununurra working with the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre on this project.
Ruben Thompson: Ruben has a double degree in linguistics and languages from the ANU and is a former ANU x Australian Signals Directorate Summer Research Scholar. Prior to joining AIATSIS, he worked at the National Indigenous Australians Agency, and before that, he worked on the revitalisation of the Muruwari language of northern NSW.
Zoe Avery: Zoe is a descendant of the Worimi peoples and has a Bachelor of Languages and Bachelor of Arts (Linguistics) from the ANU. Prior to joining AIATSIS, she spent a semester studying at Freie University Berlin and worked at the National Archives of Australia (NAA).

AIATSIS Dictionaries Program

The Umbuygamu/Morrobolam dictionary was published by De Gruyter on 2 December 2024. This is the 21^st dictionary published as part of the AIATSIS Dictionaries Program. You can purchase copies here: A Dictionary of Morrobolam

The Ngardi dictionary was published on 1 March 2025. This is the 22^nd dictionary published under the AIATSIS Dictionaries Program, and the 11th dictionary to be published by the AIATSIS imprint Aboriginal Studies Press (ASP). You can purchase copies of it and other ASP dictionaries here: Dictionaries – AIATSIS Shop.

Austlang

ACAL has kicked off a major revamp of the Austlang database, led by Dr Alexandra Marley. We have engaged the services of design company, Cre8ive, to redesign the user interface and we look forward to launching the reimagined Austlang later this year. In the meantime, an interim version of the Austlang database is still available at https://aiatsis.gov.au/austlang. Please contact austlang@aiatsis.gov.au to report any issues or provide any feedback.

National Indigenous Languages Survey

ACAL has begun the process of co-designing the 4^th National Indigenous Languages Survey, running in-person and online workshops with Indigenous stakeholders across the country to co-design the survey. NILS4 is the first AIATSIS languages survey to be co-designed with Indigenous stakeholders and also aims to be the first to survey sign languages.

The first of these full-day workshops was held at the Shine Dome, ANU, on 27 March 2025 with 11 Indigenous sign language and deaf stakeholders. Attendees shared their diverse sign language contexts and discussed key considerations to ensure the survey is accessible and valuable for their communities. Some powerful quotes, interpreted into English, are shared below with permission:

“This technology [e.g. cochlear implants] is about communication, but sign language is about being a part of a community. […] It is essential to our health and wellbeing, it is essential to being able to exercise our self-determination.”

“This is the first opportunity to have our voices heard, in terms of our experience. […] This is a great opportunity for us all to come together as one mob or group, because who else if not us?”

The next workshop will be held in Melbourne in partnership with the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages on 16 April 2025.

Paper and Talk

AIATSIS and Living Languages delivered the fourth Paper and Talk at Maraga, Canberra, between 14 and 25 October 2024. The workshops provide comprehensive archival and linguistics training sessions and facilitate access to archival language resources held at AIATSIS and other archives which may hold relevant materials. These sessions equip community researchers with invaluable skills and knowledge needed to interpret, use, and share these precious resources for their self-determined language revival outcomes, and are often participants’ first opportunity to access such training and resources.

In 2024, AIATSIS welcomed 21 community researchers, including members from the Pinikura language community, the first Western Australian group to attend a Paper and Talk, as well as Gunggay, Kabi Kabi, Kukatj, Kunjen, Mithaka and Yarluyandi language community groups.

Other highlights

ACAL hosted a themed session at the 2024 Australian Linguistic Society conference ‘Walking between two worlds – opportunities and challenges for Indigenous linguists’. The session comprised a plenary from Ngunnawal Elder and AIATSIS senior executive Dr Caroline Hughes AM, 8 presentations from domestic and internal linguistics, and a panel with 4 domestic and international Indigenous linguists: Denise Smith-Ali, Jakelin Troy, Tula Wynyard and Amina Mettouchi. The session was well-received, with one Indigenous participant commenting that “I haven’t seen so many blakfellas at an ALS conference… well done”.

AIATSIS Summit

Standard Registration for the 2025 AIATSIS Summit is now open! The 2025 Summit will be held at Darwin Convention Centre (Garramilla) between 2 to 6 June 2025. The Summit will incorporate GLAM and Research topics (2-4 June) and Indigenous Country and Governance topics (4-6 June), along with a dedicated Youth and Emerging Leadership stream across the 5 days. To learn more about the event and register, visit: https://aiatsis.gov.au/whats-new/events/aiatsis-summit-2025.

Presentations

Lauren W Reed and John Gibbs (2025), The Fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey. Presentation to International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) 9, University of Hawai’i, 8 March 2025.

Lauren Reed

Summary of survey of Honours Programs

1. Presence of Honours

Of the 15 universities surveyed, all have some honours. 13 have a 4-year end-on undergraduate Honours degree. For 10 of these, it is broadly available across disciplines and is a standard pathway to PhD. For Macquarie, Monash and Western Sydney, Honours is only present in programs requiring it for accreditation (such as Psychology), so not for linguistics. Macquarie reports that this makes it somewhat challenging to attract PhD students.

Adelaide and Griffith also have end-on honours, but as a standalone 1-year qualification following completion of a Bachelors degree.

In addition to a 4-year end-on BA (Hons), Queensland also has a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities, a 4-year embedded honours program (this does not include linguistics as option).

2. Outlook for Honours

While Honours seems to be largely secure in the immediate term in most universities, several themes emerge. One is a concern by management about low enrolment numbers. Second, consequent to that, is a move to larger groupings of disciplines for coursework, making the coursework more generic and consequently less useful. This is a response to universities’ concern about course sizes, and surrendering discipline-specific coursework has in some cases been part of a defence of Honours.

Of the 12 universities that have Honours beyond specific accrediting disciplines, 9 report no current plans or discussions around abolishing Honours (ANU, CDU, Griffith, Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, UNE, UNSW, UWA). At Sydney there have been “noises about getting rid of honours for years but nothing concrete. Academics don’t want to get rid of it. Admin has targeted other things.” However, low enrolments remain an issue there, as elsewhere.

Abolishing Honours is under active discussion at 3 universities: Adelaide, Latrobe and Newcastle. At Newcastle, Honours will be abolished from 2027, and alternative postgraduate pathways are being explored. Latrobe reports “We’re constantly fighting with the university about honours. It was almost abolished last year but we fought for it. The current way we’ve saved it is that coursework is run at the school level for all Social Science and Humanities students. The university failed to articulate a clear alternative, which is part of why we ended up getting to keep honours.” The University of Adelaide is in transition, becoming Adelaide University on 1 January 2026. While Adelaide currently has Honours, and no final decision has been reached about Honours in the new university, “word is it will be phased out and replaced with something like a 1.5 year Masters in Research. A case for 4 year courses has been made by a number of disciplines, including where consideration needs to be given to onward study options of graduates internationally. It has been easier for these arguments to be made in disciplines where accrediting bodies require a number of years’ study.”

While Honours is not under immediate threat in most universities, a move to more aggregated less discipline-specific coursework is widespread, and was reported as completed, in train, or proposed at ANU, Latrobe, Melbourne, Monash, Newcastle, Queensland and Sydney. This is also a feature of Macquarie’s Honours-being replaced by a Graduate Diploma (see below).

Among universities where Honours is not under threat per se, the Honours program at CDU was recently redeveloped and reaccredited in 2024. At UNE the HASS school is “quite committed” to Honours. At Melbourne, Honours has strong support from academics across the faculty but less enthusiasm from university management: “There are plans to restructure the Honours program, which academic staff are resisting. There is talk of changing it to become more flexible, including the ability to take more subjects across a broad suite of subjects, making the Honours degree more resemble the UG BA model. There is also talk of making the thesis component larger, both in terms of credit points, and in thesis length. Linguistics is resisting these changes as they feel the specific Honours coursework they provide is unique, gives specific skills training, and creates a cohort, and that the thesis is long enough as it is.”

At Sydney, low enrolment numbers remain an issue for management. “The faculty has demanded that all honours students do coursework and the groups must be no smaller than 20.” As a result, linguistics students now do coursework with students from other humanities disciplines.

At Queensland, it has undergone shift from courses administered by the School to a HASS Faculty managed program, resulting in a decline in Linguistics honours students.

3. Alternative pathways

All the surveyed universities except UWA have Masters or in some cases Graduate Certificate options for postgraduate research and pathways to PhD, in most cases in addition to Honours.

Of the 15 surveyed universities, one, UWA has no Masters or other option other than Honours to progress from UG to a PhD. For this reason, “abolishing Honours at UWA would not be viable as majoring graduates would have to go elsewhere to do a Masters or equivalent to qualify for PhD.”

Of the remaining 14 universities, 13 have 2-year Masters options, and 2 have a pair of consecutive 1-year programs. For 11 universities the options for postgraduate research include a 2-year coursework Master of Arts or Master of Applied Linguistics with a possible research pathway that includes a thesis and qualifies for PhD entry: ANU, CDU, Griffith, Latrobe, Melbourne, Monash, Newcastle, Sydney, Queensland, UNE and UNSW. A further 3 have (or are likely to have) a dedicated Masters by Research: Adelaide, Monash and Western Sydney. (This includes Adelaide, where the regime is not yet known but is anticipated to include a Masters by Research.)

Monash has both a Masters by Research and a Masters in Applied Linguistics with a possible research pathway. “The idea with the Monash 2-year Masters by Research was to have possibility of converting to PhD after 1 year. However, students who take this track are not competitive for PhD scholarships as they usually haven't completed a thesis by that point. Moreover, it is not popular (at least in linguistics): Despite how we present it to our senior UGs, MRes isn't tempting for many students, it feels like a bigger step to take, and only had a handful go directly from UG to MRes.”

The remaining 2 universities, Macquarie and Melbourne have pathways involving two consecutive 1-year programs. In addition to its Masters in Applied Linguistics with a research pathway, Melbourne also has a two stage Graduate Diploma pathway: a 1-year coursework Graduate Diploma can be followed by a 1-year Graduate Diploma (Advanced) involving a thesis and resembling the Honours program. Macquarie has a 1-year Graduate Diploma of Research followed by 1 year Masters of Research with a thesis. However, Macquarie reports that “the Grad Dip is Faculty based and very generic, and does not successfully equip students with the advanced knowledge and theoretical content or skills required to conduct a linguistics PhD”. Moreover, “[w]e have a battle to have students from outside MQ with good research training such as an honours year admitted directly to the PhD. They essentially have to do a second honours year (MRes) to be accepted… if we’re confident that they’re ready for the PhD we can't accept them and they’re likely to go elsewhere.”

In addition to those pathways, 7 universities also reported having an MPhil, which can be upgraded to a PhD on successful performance: Griffith, Melbourne, Newcastle, Queensland, UNE, UNSW and Western Sydney. UNSW reports that there is “some attempt to phase out [the MPhil] and funnel students into MA Research”.

Several other more individual programs exist.

Queensland has a Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalisation (for Indigenous students working on their own community languages). This has the potential for postgraduate pathways.

In addition to its Masters, Griffith also has a ““vertically-integrated” 4-year double degree: Bachelor of Languages and Linguistics + Master of Education”.

Within its Honours program, Latrobe has “Masters pathway”: students submit an honours thesis, but rather than graduate with that degree are internally assessed for “upgrade” to an MA. They then extend the research from the honours thesis into a longer MA, which is examined externally etc.

Bill Palmer

Forthcoming Event

Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

Griffith University, Gold Coast, 2 – 5 December 2025

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 Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus, Southport, QLD, from 2 to 5 December 2025.

Masterclasses
These will be held on 2 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 (3-5 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. They will focus around a coherent theme to be described in a paragraph of ca. 300 words. Themed sessions should contain 3-8 talks and can replace talk slots with a discussion slot as the organisers see fit.

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 2025
Announcements of accepted workshops/themed sessions: 15 May 2025

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

Vale

Obituary

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing on March 8, 2025 of Jeffrey Alan Siegel, UNE Professor Emeritus in Linguistics.

Jeff held a Bachelor degree from Cornell University, an MA from the University of Hawai‘i, and a PhD from the Australian National University. He subsequently taught Linguistics at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in Lae and the University of the South Pacific in Port Vila, Vanuatu. He was recruited to the University of New England in 1987, where he supported Steve Johnson, the university’s first appointment in Linguistics, in establishing Linguistics as an independent discipline. Jeff developed foundational curricula in several subjects, including Sociolinguistics.

Jeff conducted research in several interrelated areas, including contact languages, language description and documentation, language acquisition, and the teaching of non-standard varieties in formal education. He authored six books on linguistics, ranging from theoretical questions in pidgin/creole studies, to vernacular education in the South Pacific, to Hawai‘i Creole English (with Kent Sakoda), to second dialect acquisition, to his epic grammar of the PNG language of Nama, and subsequent dictionary. The Nama grammar/dictionary stemmed from his involvement in a large project on Southern New Guinea languages in collaboration with ANU Professors Nick Evans and I Wayan Arka, and was funded by the Australian Research Council. Jeff thrived on the opportunities to visit a wonderful part of remote PNG, and to work with enthusiastic local collaborators who shared much more than their language and culture with him. He returned to Australia with entertaining stories about hair-raising river journeys, and a respectful fascination for the linguistic complexity of Nama.

In 2013, he was elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Although his professional accomplishments were wide-ranging and substantial, what was most remarkable about Jeff was his sheer humanity; his modesty and generosity of spirit, his sense of humour, his commitment to helping others, particularly the refugee and Australian Indigenous communities, and his strong desire to make the most of every day. For as long as possible, even up until the last days of his terminal illness, he was sharing coffee with friends, corresponding with students, and updating his Nama dictionary. Such was his resilience.

Jeffrey Siegel was a talented linguist, a committed teacher, and a wonderful human being who touched the lives of many people. He leaves behind his wife Diana, three children (Ben, Ruth, and Jenny), six grandchildren, and many friends and colleagues.

Details about the memorial, including livestream, will be made available from this link when they are confirmed: https://piddingtons.com.au/tribute/jeffrey-siegel-21529/

Cindy Schneider and Brian Byrne

Sad news

John Michael Haiman, who worked at the ANU in the 1970s, died on 7 April, 2025.

David Nash

About ALS

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

The ALS Newsletter is issued three times per year, in March, July and October. Information for the Newsletter should be sent to the Editor, 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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ALS Newsletter #1 2025

Something from the President

News from the University of New England (UNE)

In Memoriam

Thesis Completion

Publications

Journal articles:

Book Chapters:

Peer-reviewed blog posts/research podcasts:

Book reviews:

Presentations

Media

Funding

Work in Progress

News from the University of Newcastle

People and visits

Call for submissions

PhDs and Honours news

Studies of Language Association magazine launch

Grants

Publications since November

Conference presentations since November

News from the University of Queensland

New program:

New Project:

New PhD!

New Publications:

News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)

Teaching and learning

HDR news

New projects

Visiting Fellowship

Publications

Presentations

Conferences

Top End Linguistic Circle (TELC)

News from Monash University

GENERAL NEWS

GRANTS/FELLOWSHIPS

BOOKS, EDITED VOLUMES AND SPECIAL ISSUES

JOURNAL ARTICLES

BOOK CHAPTERS

PHD COMPLETIONS

News from Macquarie University

Phonetics Lab Updates

Grant

Publications

Journal Articles:

Conference Proceedings

Invited Presentations

Workshop Seminars

Conference Presentations

Awards:

News from Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis Lab

Thesis completions

Awards and grants

News from the Child Language Lab

Journal articles

MRes Completions

Conference

Other publications and presentations from the department

Edited Anthology

Journal Articles

Conference Proceedings

Book Chapters

Recent Presentations

HDR Completions

Staff movements

News from the University of Western Australia

Academic promotion

University of Oxford visiting fellowship

New partnership

New research agreement

New book

PhD student updates

Staff updates

Publications

Conference presentations

Workshop presentation

Conference organisation