Rate My Professor Sally Dixon

Dr. Sally Dixon serves as Senior Lecturer and Discipline Convenor in Linguistics within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of New England. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 2017, BA Honours in Linguistics and BSc in Psychology from the University of New South Wales, and Graduate Certificate in Linguistics and Language Endangerment Studies from Monash University. Her accolades include the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Documentation Grant in 2019, Susan Kaldor Travel Grant from the Australian Linguistics Society in 2010, Australian Postgraduate Award, and Mar Prize for Linguistics from UNSW in 2004.

Dixon's career encompasses significant contributions to Indigenous language documentation and education. She joined the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project in 2011, creating a corpus of Alyawarr children’s bi-varietal language use applying the Variationist Comparative Method. Previously, as a field linguist at Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre, she documented endangered Pilbara languages and produced revitalisation resources such as 'How to Read and Write Pilbara Languages' (2011), 'Juwaliny Sketch Grammar and Dictionary' (2009), and 'Yulparija Sketch Grammar' (2008). She also developed multilingual curricula for an Indigenous education NGO in the Philippines and taught linguistics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Erfurt University in Germany. Her research specializes in descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and education, examining linguistic outcomes of contact—including multilingualism, border region practices, and contact varieties—with emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language ecologies (ARC Special Research Initiative 2021-2023) and Sydney Aboriginal English. Notable publications include 'Alywarr English: a new contact language of Central Australia' (Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2023), 'Multilingual repertoires at play: structure and function in reported speech utterances of Alyawarr children' (Languages, 2021), 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!: Object requests, ownership and entitlement in a children’s play session' (Journal of Pragmatics, 2015), and 'Alyawarr children’s use of two closely-related languages' in From Home to School (2017). She teaches LING101 Introduction to Linguistics, LING102 Foundations of Linguistics, LING305/505 Meaning in Language, and LING366/566 Australia’s Indigenous Languages.