John Bowden (linguist)


John Frederick Bowden is a linguist who specializes in Austronesian and Papuan linguistics. His main research interests are the languages of eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste.

Education

Bowden obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics at the University of Auckland. In 1992, he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne, where he wrote a grammatical description of the Taba language for his dissertation.

Career

Together with researchers from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, he documented the Gamkonora language, a Papuan language of Halmahera. He has done research on non-standard Malay lingua francas such as North Moluccan Malay and the dialect of Jakarta. Also, Bowden has extensively studied South Halmahera languages, especially on linguistic typology, language contact, and grammar.
He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. For about 10 years, he was a researcher at the Australian National University. He was also employed as a local director of the Jakarta Field Station of the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.

Selected works

Selected works by John Bowden: