Dr Sally Dixon

Biography

My research and applied work is focused at the intersection of descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics and education. I have always been interested in linguistic outcomes of contact, such as individual multilingualism, language practises in border regions, and contact varieties. I am particularly interested in the linguistic and social implications for minoritised varieties and their speakers in contexts of language contact.

I joined the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project in 2011, undertaking a study of Alyawarr children’s use of two closely-related language varieties in central Australia. This included building a corpus of transcribed video data of naturalistic language use in home and school settings. My work on this project is unique in its application of the Variationist Comparative Method to bi-varietal child language data.

Prior to this, I worked for several years at Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre as a field linguist. In this role I was responsible for the documentation and description of several highly endangered Pilbara languages as well as the creation of resources to be used in language revitalisation and maintenance efforts. I also spent a year in the Philippines working for a local Indigenous people’s education NGO, where I developed multilingual curricula and teaching materials.

Before coming to UNE, I lived in Germany for 3.5 years, teaching linguistics in the English Studies departments of the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena) and Erfurt University (Erfurt).

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