Jill Vaughan
Jill Vaughan is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Research Unit for Indigenous Language. Her work centres on the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, and seeks to understand how and why multilingual and multilectal speakers draw on their different codes to express their place in the world. In exploring these questions, she engages in research on multilingual practices, migration, language variation and change, and language in the classroom.
Her doctoral research focused on maintenance of the Irish language. This work produced a multi-sited ethnography of Irish language use across communities in Ireland and the Irish diaspora, and an analysis of cultural and political discourses around the language. Her current work is centred on fieldwork and community language support in the linguistically diverse and highly multilingual region of Arnhem Land (northern Australia).
Recent projects have included Endangered Languages Documentation Programme ELDP-funded documentation of dialectal variation and multilingual repertoires among speakers of the Burarra language of the Maningrida region and collaborative work with community organisations to record artists’ narratives and procedural texts in various local languages.
Linguistic outreach activities outside academia include her role as a founding member of The Linguistics Roadshow, an interactive showcase about the science of language for rural students, and as project manager for the 50 Words Project which aims to provide recordings of fifty words in every Indigenous language of Australia through an interactive online map.
