Laura Arnold

I'm a linguist who does fieldwork with endangered languages in west New Guinea. Most of my work focusses on the languages spoken in the beautiful Raja Ampat archipelago, just off the northwest tip of New Guinea. I use data from these languages to investigate theoretical, typological, and historical questions about the phonetics and phonology of word prosody, the morphosyntactic expression of possession and spatial deixis, and language contact, diversification, and change more generally. I've recently taken up a new Lectureship in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

I work in partnership with the wonderful Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Manokwari. If you're thinking of doing research in Indonesian Papua, I strongly suggest you get in touch with them :)

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News

13 June 2025: Two recent papers I'm very proud of: (1) The diachrony of word-prosody in the Ma'ya-Salawati languages of Raja Ampat, in which I show how tone developed alongside lexical stress in the ancestor of several Austronesian languages in northwest New Guinea, giving rise to the unusual word-prosodic systems they have today; (2) Late Vernacular Production in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with George Saad and Emma Peddie, where we discuss all known cases of a striking pattern of language acquisition and use in the ISEA/Pacific region: speakers grow up apparently monolingual in the lingua franca, then begin producing the vernacular later in life—often as they start taking on the roles and responsibilities of mature community members.

29 August 2024: It's finally out! The first typological overview of the Austronesian languages of Halmahera and West New Guinea, written in collaboration with Emily Gasser and David Kamholz, and published alongside dozens of other exciting papers on the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia.

23 May 2024: Here's a link to a fun new cross-disciplinary paper with several colleagues in archaeology and oral history, showing that—contrary to previous characterisations of Raja Ampat as a sleepy backwater—these islands have been pivotal in articulating global transformative processes of migration and exchange between Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

14 December 2023: All of the Raja Ampat data collected during my British Academy Fellowship is now archived and freely available on Edinburgh DataShare! You can access the data here: datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/8573

1 December 2023: I've a new paper out in Oceanic Linguistics, in which I reconstruct Split Inalienable Coding in the East Bird's Head family.