LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY - Profesor Dr. Peter K. Austin

Märit Rausing Chair in Field Linguistics

Peter Austin joined SOAS, University of London in October 2002 after having held a Humboldt Prize at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He was previously Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (1996-2002) and Reader in Linguistics at La Trobe University (1981-1996). He has held visiting appointments at University of Frankfurt, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, University of Hong Kong, and Stanford University. He studied at the Australian National University, completing a BA with first class Honours in Asian Studies (Japanese and Linguistics) in 1974, and a PhD in 1978 on the Diyari language spoken in the far north of South Australia. He taught at the University of Western Australia (1978), held a Harkness Fellowship for post-doctoral research at UCLA and MIT (1979-80), and in 1981 returned to Australia to set up the Department of Linguistics at La Trobe University.

Peter's research interests cover descriptive, theoretical and applied linguistics. He has extensive fieldwork experience on Australian Aboriginal languages (northern New South Wales, northern South Australia, and north-west Western Australia) and in 1996 co-authored with David Nathan the first fully hypertextual dictionary on the World Wide Web, a bilingual dictionary of Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi), northern New South Wales, as well as publishing seven bilingual dictionaries of Aboriginal languages. Since 1995 he has been carrying out research on Sasak and Samawa (or Sumbawan), Austronesian languages spoken on Lombok and Sumbawa islands, eastern Indonesia. His theoretical research is mainly on language documentation, syntax (with a focus on Lexical Functional Grammar), morpho-syntactic typology, computer-aided lexicography and multi-media for endangered languages. He has also published on historical and comparative linguistics, typology, and Aboriginal history and biography.

Peter is currently working with the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation on a language revitalisation project funded by an Indigenous Languages Support grant -- you can read about the project and its activities on this blog.

Peter currently is a member of the following bodies: 

• Linguistics Board of Cambridge University Press 
• Consulting Editorial Board of Studies in Language 
• Editorial Board of Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change 
• Editorial Board of Indonesia and the Malay World 
• Chair of the Linguistics Advisory Board of the Volkswagen Foundation DoBeS project 
• Board member of the World Language Documentation Centre 
• Advisory Board of the Vigdis Finnbogadottir Institute, University of Iceland 
• Advisory Board of the World Oral Literature Project University of Cambridge 
• Academic Advisor of Commonwealth Scholarship Commission 

Peter is currently supervising 8 PhD students (and on the PhD committees of 6 others) working on languages spoken in Australia, Ghana, Nepal, Sarawak, Taiwan, Solomon Islands, and Iran. See here for their names and provisional thesis titles.

Since February 2007 Peter has been an occasional contributor to the "Endangered Languages and Cultures" blog. You can access all his blog posts in reverse chronological order here. He also contributes to EL Blog from the Endangered Languages Archive.