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 of us are puzzled by the relative lack of sound change in Australia, but we don’t agree on what that implies and how to deal with it. We’ve all done fieldwork and understand the complexities of multilingual and multilectal communities and what that means for change, but we disagree about how that might scale up to the Holocene. We agree that all sorts of different data are important for reconstructing history, but we use different material in practice and place different weights on it.
(After the Routledge 2nd edition I said I would never edit another book ever ever again, but now I’m wondering if something that explores these questions from all different angles by people who disagree but can actually talk to each other might be worth doing.)
I’m not sure what “the Dixon book” is, but here’s her previous post about it:
One of the complaints about me in the new Dixon book is about challenging the number of “250 languages” (which appears to have struck a nerve because he reiterates this figure many times). All previous 20th century classifications have about 250 languages. That’s right. But they don’t have the same 250! They each miss different languages. So when you total them up, you get something like 380. Then you take into account more recent work in the Top End and another group of languages turn up. (And include palawa languages.) Then there’s a few known from name and report of intelligibility only, which I included but many don’t. Then on top of that you have the points where people differ about whether two varieties are “same” or “different”, which gives somewhere between about 420 and 480 languages. Summary: 250 is wrong. Definitely higher. How much higher depends on all the things linguists usually argue about. (All this is in Chapter 7 of OGAL but if you just kvetch at the classification at the front and admire the 80-odd footnotes about sources then maybe you might miss it.)
This extremely laudatory review contends that what one might have thought was simply a 2025 revised edition of an influential work from much earlier in Dixon’s career “is not merely an update but a monumental event in linguistic scholarship.”
https://linguistlist.org/issues/36/3476/
Whether it’s a language-specific grammar written in a broad enough style to include negative comments about the contentions of other scholars (who should no doubt feel honored to be deprecated rather than simply ignored) is not clear to me from the review, but maybe?
I am myself not up to speed on what advances in the analysis of Dyirbal grammar may have been made in the 40-odd years since I first became acquainted with Dixon’s then-views, so maybe I should get myself a copy.
I’m not sure what “the Dixon book” is
It’s Australian Comparative Linguistics: An Evaluation (2026). I have not seen it yet. Publisher’s page here, for LH readers who are interested.
May I recommend Claire Bowern, ed., The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages (here) to LH readers who are unfamiliar with Australian languages and wish to learn more about them? (This is the OGAL in the Facebook post that was quoted.)
Claire Bowern:
I found the Gambay first languages map with 780 indigenous Australian languages, apparently following OGAL.
It’s Australian Comparative Linguistics: An Evaluation (2026).
Thanks!