Dr Patrick McConvell
Research Fellow, Language and Society
Contact Details
GPO Box 553
AIATSIS
Canberra ACT 2601
Telephone: +61 2 6246 1116
Facsimile: +61 2 6249 7714
Dr Patrick McConvell has worked on Australian Indigenous languages for many years, especially in the west of the Northern Territory, and the Kimberleys and Pilbara of Western Australia. Apart from grammar and dictionary work, he is interested in the maintenance of languages, and in the shift to Kriol, code-switching and mixing of languages. He has been involved with the setting up of the Kimberley Language Resource Centre; working in bilingual schools; and training of Indigenous language workers at Batchelor.
Dr McConvell taught linguistic and social anthropology at Northern Territory (now Charles Darwin) and Griffith Universities. His major research interests include the relationship between language, society and culture, interdisciplinary prehistory, and kinship. He has also been principal anthropologist in six land claims under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act and three Native Title claims in the Northern Territory and Queensland.
Current Research Projects
• Gurindji Grammar and Dictionary compilation
• The Aboriginal Children’s Language Acquisition ARC project with Sydney and Melbourne Universities – investigating how children are currently learning languages in four Central Australian communities.
• The DoBeS (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Project on languages and cultures of the Victoria River District, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (click here for details -- external link: opens in a new window)
• Linguistic prehistory of Australia and investigating the past with the aid of linguistic evidence.
• Developing AUSTLANG (link to trial version http://austlang.aiatsis.gov.au), the web Indigenous Languages database with Kazuko Obata
More information on Patrick McConvell's current projects is available on the language maintenance projects page.
Recent Publications
McConvell, Patrick and Kazuko Obata. 2006. A higher order of kinship semantics: Trirelational kinship terms and kin-based pronouns in Australia. Poster presented at the Third Oxford-Kobe Linguistics Seminar: The linguistics of endangered languages. Kobe, Japan, 2--5 April 2006.
McConvell, Patrick, D. Marmion and S. McNichol. 2005. Report of the National Indigenous Language Survey of Australia. Canberra: DCITA/AIATSIS/FATSIL.
McConvell, Patrick and M. Florey. 2005. Language shift, code-mixing and variation, Australian Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Special Issue).
McConvell, Patrick and F. Meakins. 2005. Gurindji Kriol: A mixed language emerges from code-switching, Australian Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 25, No.1, pp. 9-30.
McConvell, Patrick. 2004. A short ride in a time machine: Linguistics, culture history and Native Title in Toussaint, S. (ed.): Crossing Boundaries: Cultural, legal, historical and practice issues in Native Title. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
McConvell, Patrick and M. Laughren. 2004. Ngumpin-Yapa Languages, in H. Koch and C. Bowern (eds): Australian Languages: Reconstruction and Subgrouping. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
McConvell, Patrick and M. Smith. 2003. Millers and mullers: The archaeolinguistic stratigraphy of seed-grinding in Central Australia, in H. Andersen (ed.): Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in Stratigraphy. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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Use this link to see Patrick McConvell's CV and more detailed bibliography (pdf).