Professor Peter K. Austin
Marit Rausing Chair in Field Linguistics,
Director: Endangered Languages Academic Programme

Peter Austin joined SOAS in October 2002 after having held a Humboldt Prize at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt. He was previously Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (1996-2002) and has held visiting appointments at 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 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 has co-authored with David Nathan the first fully page-formatted hypertext 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 syntax and focuses 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 currently has a small research grant from the British Academy to work with native-speaker scholar Eli Timan on the Jewish Iraqi language, including recording the oldest generation of speakers talking about traditional practices and their memories of life in Iraq before they were expelled from Baghdad. This work is being done with the diaspora community in London, Canada and Israel.

In 2007 Peter became an occasional contributor to the "Transient Languages and Cultures" blog based at the University of Sydney

Selected publications

Austin, Peter K. in press 'The Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) Language, northern New South Wales - A Brief History of Research' in William McGregor (ed.) Encountering Aboriginal languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics, 37-58. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Austin, Peter K. in press 'Training for language documentation: the SOAS experience' In Margaret Florey and Victoria Rau (eds.) Endangered Austronesian Languages special issue Language Documentation and Conservation. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press

Austin, Peter K. in press 'The classification of Pinikura, Western Australia'. To appear in a Festschrift.

Austin, Peter K. (ed.) 2008 1,000 Languages London: Ivy Press.

Austin, Peter K. 2008 'Survival of Languages' in Emily F. Shuckburgh (ed.) Survival: The Survival of the Human Race, 80-98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Austin, Peter K. 2006 'Content questions in Sasak, eastern Indonesia: an optimality theoretic syntax account' in Fritz Schulze and Holger Warnk (eds.) Insular Southeast Asia: Linguistic and Cultural Studies in Honour of Bernd Nothofer, 1-12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Austin, Peter K. 2006 'Data and language documentation' in Jost Gippert, Nikolaus Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds.) Essentials of Language Documentation, 87-112. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Austin, Peter K. 2006 'Gamilaraay' in Keith Brown (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, 4:724-727. Oxford: Elsevier.

Austin, Peter K. 2006 'Jiwarli' in Keith Brown (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, 6:125-129. Oxford: Elsevier.

Austin, Peter K. 2006 'Australia: Language Situation' in Keith Brown (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, 1:580-585. Oxford: Elsevier.

Austin, Peter K. 2004 'Les clitiques du sasak (Indon¨¦sie de l'est)' Faits de Langue 23-24:195-212.

Austin, Peter K. 2003 'Australian Aboriginal Lexicography' in R.R.K. Hartman (ed.) Lexicography: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, chapter 41 (pp. 288-294). London: Routledge.

Austin, Peter K., Oliver Bond and David Nathan (eds.) 2007 Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory. London: SOAS.

Austin, Peter K. and Lenore Grenoble 2007 'Current Trends in Language Documentation'. Language Documentation and Description, Vol 4, 12-25. London: SOAS.

Austin, Peter K. and Luise Hercus 2004 'The Yarli languages' in Claire Bowern and Harold Koch (eds) Subgrouping and Australian Languages, 227-244. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Austin, Peter K. and Simon Musgrave (eds.) 2007 Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian Languages. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Austin, Peter K. and Andrew Simpson (eds.) 2007 Endangered Languages. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 14. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.