This is a photo of me at a school on Tanna, southern Vanuatu, with the equivalent of a dunce's cap. The sign says "I must not speak language" and refers to not speaking the local indigenous language at school.
Nick Thieberger home pageQualifications: BA(Hons), MA (Linguistics, LaTrobe University), PhD (University of Melbourne)
e-mail: See also my University of Melbourne page
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8797-1018; Wikidata entry: Q7026302. ISNI identifier: 0000 0001 0963 0154; VIAF identifier: 31243678; Web of Science identifier: D-6044-2014
A brief work history and list of projects I have run A list of my publications and presentations A list of some training sessions I have run Recent media interviews Awards I have received I am an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (Australia). I am adjunct at the University of Sydney, University of Hawai'i, LaTrobe University, Australian National University, and the University of Tasmania. The LinguistList has a brief bio on their 'featured linguist' page here. LDACA produced a blogpost interview with me here. I am also:Director of PARADISEC A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities President of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN) Lead CI in the ARC LIEF grant 'Nyingarn: a platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages' (2021-2025) Lead CI in the ARC LIEF grant: Modularised cultural heritage archives – future-proofing PARADISEC (2022-2025) Chief Investigator in the ARDC-funded project “Online Heritage Resource Manager to Describo Collections” (2023-2024) Chief Investigator in the project Modelling Pacific Creoles with DSTG and colleagues at the ANU (2022-2025) Chief Investigator in the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDACA) Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (2014-2025) Recipient of a Ludwig Leichhardt-Jubiläumsstipendium from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in November 2012 Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne. Career highlights
Establishing the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre (Wangka Maya) after community consultations in the mid-late 1980s and working there until the end of 1990 Building the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive and the Indigenous Languages Database (now Austlang) (at AIATSIS 1991-1994) Running the Paper and Talk conference in 1993 (which became the inspiration for the Breath of Life workshops in north America) and editing the book of the same name (downloadable here) Running the AIATSIS Dictionaries Project (1992-1994), resulting in 50 dictionaries. Establishing (with Margaret Florey) the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity (now known as Living Languages) Working at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and building an electronic catalog of the museum collections (1995-1997) Writing the first major survey of Australian Indigenous languages, the State of Indigenous Languages report (with Pat McConvell), 2001. Being part of the team that built the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and continuing as its Project Manager, then Director Learning the Nafsan (South Efate) language, building a corpus of archived material for the language and writing the first grammar that is embedded in a corpus of field recordings. A guide to the contents of the Nafsan collection can be found here Building Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i's digital ethnographic archive In 2009 I was the chair of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation and was on the organising committee for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation Production of EOPAS, a system for presenting interlinear texts and media online (no longer functioning) Building an accessible online form of the vocabularies from the Daisy Bates papers, using the Text Encoding Initiative encoding. Leading the the ARC-LEF funded project Nyingarn- a platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages (2021-2023), also using the Text Encoding Initiative encoding. Recipient of an ARC Australian Postdoctoral award (2004-2007); QEII Fellowship (2009-2014); Future Fellowship (2014-2018) Editor of the journal Language Documentation & Conservation (2011-2021) I am an occasional blogger here: http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/. Awards
2025, I was awarded the 2025 Open Scholarship Award, sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, on behalf of the PARADISEC team. 2024, The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures - took the highly competitive Digital Repository of Ireland Award for Research and Innovation. 2021 I received the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH) award for Research Partnership and Social Impact. I was awarded a Ludwig Leichhardt Jubilee Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) to work with colleagues at the University of Cologne, with the topic of ‘Documenting the world's languages with new technologies’ (2013-2015) I received a University of Melbourne Staff Engagement Project Grant of $8,000 in October 2013 to work on a Somali-English crowdsourcing dictionary app. Because I travel by air so much for my work, I have offset this carbon cost by investing in the Hepburn windfarm, and GreenFleet.
I am also a musician and play wind (flute, whistles, saxes) and am currently a member of Havana Palava.
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This is a photo of me at a school on Tanna, southern Vanuatu, with the equivalent of a dunce's cap. The sign says "I must not speak language" and refers to not speaking the local indigenous language at school. |
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