Across the world minority languages are under threat from larger regional and global languages as communities shift their preferences in favour of what they perceive as economically, politically and socially more powerful tongues. In the process languages become endangered as children are no longer learning them -- eventually such threatened languages can and do disappear. This lecture will address a number of issues: What are the factors that determine a language's survival? Are all smaller languages doomed to replacement by a few larger stronger ones? If a language is endangered is there anything that can be done to ensure that it does survive and does not become extinct?
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 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 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.
The lectures are given at 5.30 p.m. in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, with an adjacent overflow theatre with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people so you must arrive early to ensure a place.