$28 million ARC Centre of Excellence grant for languages

A new Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language led by ANU has received $28 million in funding.

The Centre is a collaboration between researchers from the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) and the College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP) as well as other Australian universities.

In the same round of funding, another ANU-led Centre, the Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, received a $22 million grant. 

The funding recognises research excellence in Australia and will allow new research to be undertaken for the next seven years.

“The funding of these ARC Centres of Excellence reflects the University’s commitment to build interdisciplinary teams of researchers with leading international partners to address two of the most challenging and significant research problems for Australia,” says Professor Margaret Harding, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research).

Professor Nicholas Evans from CAP is Director of the Centre, which is the only ANU ARC Centre of Excellence in the field of humanities and creative arts.

“The Centre will transform our understanding of language diversity across the Asia-Pacific region,” Professor Evans said.

“With a quarter of the world¹s languages spoken here in our region, the new Centre will help address the many challenges raised by language diversity. It will also support the development of new learning technologies vital for a truly multilingual and future-proofed Australia.”

CASS is well represented in the Centre, with Professor Jane Simpson as Deputy Director and Professor Kim Sterelny and Professor Catherine Travis as Chief Investigators. 

"The Centre will lay the groundwork for much deeper understanding of how languages are learned, processed and how they decay, with major implications for children and adults learning languages, and older adults losing languages," said Professor Simpson. 

This caps off a terrific year for the School of Language Studies, which also received a $1 million anonymous donation to support Portuguese, Russian and Indigenous Australian language studies.

The Centre includes researchers from the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Sydney, as well as collaborations with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the language technology company Appen, and other national and international partner organisations and universities.

ANU is a partner on five further successful Centres of Excellence.