Claire Bowern (PhD, Harvard, 2004) is Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. She is a specialist in historical linguistics and language documentation, with particular reference to the languages of Australia. Her was a study of verb morphology in the Nyulnyulan family of Australian languages. She does fieldwork in northern Australia on Yolŋu and Nyulnyulan languages and has written several reference grammars. Her current research involves the possible differences between languages spoken by hunter-gatherer groups and the better-studied languages of agriculturalists. She has led an interdisciplinary initiative funded by the National Science Foundation’s Human Social Dynamics program to investigate hunter-gatherer language change, including differences in loan rates, material culture nomenclature, and ethnobiology.
