About me

This is who I am academically. ALEXANDRA Y. AIKHENVALD (PhD, Dlitt, FAHA, MAE) is Professor at the Jawun Research Centre of Central Queensland University (Cairns), and Australian Laureate Fellow. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003) and on languages of the Sepik region of New Guinea, including The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008; paperback 2010), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American and Papuan languages and typological issues including, evidentials, classifiers, and serial verbs. She edited numerous books, among them The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (2018, pb 2024) and, jointly with R. M. W. Dixon, The Cambridge Handbook of linguistic typology (2017, pb 2020). Her other major publications include Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices (OUP, 2000), Language contact in Amazonia (OUP, 2002), Evidentiality (OUP, 2004, pb 2006), Imperatives and commands (OUP, 2010, pb 2014), Languages of the Amazon (OUP, 2012, pb 2015), The art of grammar: a practical guide (OUP, 2014 pb and hb), How gender shapes the world (OUP, 2016, pb 2018), Serial verbs (OUP, 2018, pb 2021), The web of knowledge: evidentiality at the cross-roads (Brill, 2021), A guide to gender and classifiers (OUP, 2025), and a general interest book I saw the dog: how language works (Profile books, 2021).