What Australianists Agree On.

An interesting Facebook post from Claire Bowern: I promise I will stop posting about the Dixon book shortly and go back to #chookbook updates, fieldwork book edits and complaints about email, but I was thinking this morning about what Australianists do and don’t seem to agree on, particularly the linguists. (“we disagree” here means “different people think different things, not “I think one thing and other people think something else”, just in case that’s not clear). I’m pretty sure almost all of us agree that Pama-Nyungan is a language family, in the same way that Austronesian or Indo-European are language families. We don’t all agree on the composition of the family or its internal structure. We have radically different estimates of how old the family is (4-15kya!). We pretty much all agree that language change works the same way in Australia that it does elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure we don’t agree on how language change works and what processes are most important. Pretty much all…