Much of my work has focused on documenting and describing varieties of Australian Kriol, as well as other Australian contact varieties. Many contact varieties in northern Australia have little, or no documentation or description. This means that although these languages are typically the major language of a given community, there are few resources available for them, and service providers who travel to these communities are often aware that these languages even exist.
My work in this area aims to provide documentation and description of various contact languages spoken in northern Australia, which can then provide the foundation for the production of materials to promote awareness and understanding of these languages. So far, my work has focused in particular on a variety of Kriol spoken in the north-east part of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This has included the collection of a 50-hour corpus of the language, which is housed at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring language and culture centre, as well as various publications describing different grammatical aspects of Kriol.
Currently, I am collaborating with Kriol speakers and linguists at the University of Cologne to produce a grammatical description of Kriol speaker in the regional centre of Kununurra, in the East Kimberley. This grammar aims to be accessible to both community members, service providers and linguists.
Through collaborations with other linguists, I have also written about grammatical aspects of other Kriol varieties spoken in the Northern Territory, and the mixed language Light Warlpiri.
Relevant publications:
Brown, C. (2023). Temporality and aspect in Kununurra Kriol: Toginabad bla taim garra Kriol [PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia].
Brown, C. (2024). Kriol. In L. Körtvélyessy & P. Štekauer (Eds.), Onomatopoeia in the World’s Languages (pp. 277–288). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111053226-023
Brown, C., & Ponsonnet, M. (2021). Constraints on subject elision in northern Australian Kriol: Between discourse and syntax. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 41(3), 287–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1962807
Brown, C., & Ponsonnet, M. (2024). Event plurality and the verbal suffix ‑(a)bad in Australian Kriol. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 39(1), 187–218. https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00126.bro
O’Shannessy, C., & Brown, C. (2021). Reflexive and Reciprocal Encoding in the Australian Mixed Language, Light Warlpiri. Languages, 6, 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020105
Connor Brown - Linguist 