Ilana Mushin is Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, specialising in pragmatics, typology, and interactional linguistics in Australian Aboriginal languages, especially Garrwa. She has also recently worked on early years classroom interaction and on Queensland varieties of Aboriginal English. She is President of the Australian Linguistic Society (2020-2023).
Australia is home to the world’s oldest living cultures. The languages of Australia’s First Nations were formed and shaped continuously over 60 millennia, and massively disrupted by the advent of colonisation 232 years ago. The sounds, grammars, meanings and modes of expression of First Nations languages are understood today by linguists to provide unique insights into human language capability and diversity. This panel will touch on some of the big questions in Theoretical Linguistics – in Historical Linguistics, Morphosyntax, Phonetics, Semantics and Pragmatics – that can be better explained through attention to Australia’s First Nations languages.
