Linguistics’ Bowern earns prestigious NSF grant

Linguistics’ Bowern earns prestigious NSF grant

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

Rice University’s Claire Bowern hopes to advance understanding of how language spread across the globe by investigating language change in prehistoric Australia.

Her $450,000 five-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund research on Australia’s past indigenous languages that she hopes to use to answer important questions about the nature of language change.

SUBMITTED PHOTO

Work by Claire Bowern, center, could lend insight to how Australia’s 250 languages spread throughout the continent and how their speakers came to live where they do today.

Bowern’s work could lend insight to how Australia’s 250 languages spread throughout the continent and how their speakers came to live where they do today.

”It’s only recently that it’s become possible to do this sort of work, and now it’s time to gather together as much language material as we can. It’s extremely difficult to test any of the available models when the data have to be put together piecemeal,” said Bowern, assistant professor of linguistics. “There is important historical work on Australian languages, but we are still at an early stage in discovering the history of these languages. I will give a lot of focus to writing down and inputting data.”

Detailed records of these indigenous languages date back only 200 years, though humans have lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years. However, by studying the forms of words in modern languages, researchers like Bowern can draw inferences about which languages various groups spoke, and in some cases, where they spoke them.

Historical linguistics work in Australia is still in its infancy, Bowern said, since many Australian languages are spoken by very small numbers of people, and descriptive and documentary work has taken precedence.

Building a language database

An Australian who came to the U.S. eight years ago, Bowern hopes to create a functional database with more than 200,000 records that can help reconstruct words from different languages and find similarities that could show how populations dispersed. A byproduct of the historical database work will be word-lists that can feed into community language programs.

She also aims to disseminate discoveries through popular media, such as Wikipedia and a broadcast radio program, to broaden general knowledge of Australian languages.

While Bowern will have many challenges with her fieldwork, perhaps paramount are the scarcity of language speakers and lack of linguistic records. Many of the 250 languages are on the verge of extinction. Approximately two-thirds of those languages can be grouped into a single family, known as Pama-Nyungan. The remaining languages can be grouped into 25 other language families.

“A lot of my work will be to set up the skeleton for future work,” Bowern said. “I want to give other people a starting place so the field can continue to grow and move forward.”

Some claim that the same linguistics methods used in Europe and the Americas do not work in Australia. Should that claim render true, it would profoundly impact study and research in linguistics since those methods are based on properties of language change that have been thought to be universal. However, Bowern’s groundwork shows systematic similarities between words in various Australian languages.

“Just about all the preliminary work indicates that Australian languages show the same characteristics that we find elsewhere,” Bowern said. “Small speech community size, widespread multilingualism and other factors have obscured relationships between these languages.”

Personally, this grant sets a research path for Bowern. The research questions she will investigate and answer will form the basis for her long-term research.

Working with students

What excites Bowern most about this grant is the opportunity to involve her students in the research and build the profile of Australian linguistics in the wider field and beyond.

“Outreach and education are important components of my project,” Bowern said. “In addition to the research, I will focus on training students in the field and creating an experience that will equip them for their own future research work.”

Graduate and undergraduate students in Rice’s linguistics department will assist Bowern.

Bowern’s proposal was selected from 112 considered by the Linguistics Advisory Panel for an NSF CAREER grant. The grant is one of the NSF’s most prestigious awards and  supports early career-development activities of teacher-scholars. It aims to build a scholar’s foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.

Bowern is also the recipient of an NSF/National Endowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages grant to work on stories written in the 1920s for the Bardi language of northwestern Australia.

She has previously held language documentation grants from the Endangered Languages Documentation Program, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Endangered Language Fund.