Academy Fellow

Felicity Meakins is an ARC Future Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Queensland and a CI in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She is a field linguist who specialises in the documentation of Australian Indigenous languages in the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory and the effect of English on Indigenous languages. She has worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalisation programs, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into Indigenous languages. She has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars of traditional Indigenous languages and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia. Meakins is also the co-author of Understanding Linguistic Fieldwork (Routledge, 2019), Songs from the Stations (SUP, 2019), Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013) and the author of Case-marking in contact (Benjamins, 2011).

Editor of the Contact Language Library

Future Fellowship, DECRA, APD

Member of AIATSIS

1. Meakins, F., Disbray, S., & Simpson, J. (2020). Which MATter matters in PATtern borrowing? The direction of case merger. Morphology. doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09357-3

2. Meakins, F., & Pensalfini, R. (2020). Holding the mirror up to converted languages: Two grammars, one lexicon. International Journal of Bilingualism. doi:10.1177/1367006920922461

3. Meakins, F., Hua, X., Algy, C., & Bromham, L. (2019). The birth of a new language does not favour simplification. Language, 95(2), 294-332. 

4. Meakins, F., Pensalfini, R., Zipf, C., & Hamilton-Hollaway, A. (2020). Lend me your verbs: Verb borrowing between Jingulu and Mudburra. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 40(3), 1-23. doi:10.1080/07268602.2020.1804830

5. Bromham, L., Hua, X., Algy, C., & Meakins, F. (2020). Indigenous language endangerment: a multidimensional analysis of risk factors. Journal of Language Evolution, 5(1), 75-91. doi:10.1093/jole/lzaa002