Jane Simpson
Jane Simpson is Chair of Indigenous Linguistics and Head of the School of Language Studies at The Australian National University. She works on Australian Aboriginal languages, especially syntax and semantics, but also place-names, dictionaries, land-claims, kinship systems, and reconstructing what languages were like from old written sources. She is currently working on a longitudinal study of Aboriginal children learning their first language. Other projects include a computational grammar of Indonesian, work on intercultural communication, and Australian English lexicons.
The Land is a Map »
Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia
Edited by: Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, Jane Simpson
Publication date: March 2009
The entire Australian continent was once covered with networks of Indigenous placenames. These names often evoke important information about features of the environment and their place in Indigenous systems of knowledge. On the other hand, placenames assigned by European settlers and officials are largely arbitrary, except for occasional descriptive labels such as ‘river, lake, mountain’. They typically commemorate people, or unrelated places in the…