2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics and Michael Clyne Prize

The Language-on-the-Move team is conducting award-winning research

The Language on the Move team is delighted to share news of our multiple-award-winning research!

2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics

The winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics have just been announced and we are delighted that our very own Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. Alexandra receives the award for her thesis about the ways in which language rights affect minority languages in China. The full thesis can be downloaded here and a short overview is available here.

The second joint winner of the prize is Isabel O’Keeffe (Melbourne University), who receives the award for her thesis about “Multilingual manyardi/kun-borrk: Manifestations of multilingualism in the classical song traditions of western Arnhem Land”.

Both theses were commended for being “outstanding pieces of innovative, creative, and personal linguistic scholarship”.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize begun in 2013 and awarded annually to the best PhD which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact).

The notice for submissions for the 2018 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics will appear in early 2018 in the newsletter of the Australian Linguistics Society.

2017 Michael Clyne Prize

For the Language on the Move team, this recognition of Alexandra’s success follows hot on the heels of the announcement that another team member, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, is the winner of the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize. The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva receives the prize for her thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families”. An abstract and a link to the full thesis is available here.

This is, in fact, the second time the Michael Clyne Prize award goes to a member of the Language on the Move research group. Donna Butorac won the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about “Imagined identity, remembered self: Settlement language learning and the negotiation of gendered subjectivity”. Furthermore, Vera Williams Tetteh’s thesis about “Language, Education and Settlement: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia” was the runner-up for the 2016 award.

These and all our PhD theses are available from our PhD Hall of Fame.