Barry Blake

Barry John Blake (born 1937) is an Australian linguist, specialising in the description of Australian Aboriginal languages. He is a professor emeritus at La Trobe University Melbourne.

Career

Blake was born in the northern Melbourne suburb of Ascot Vale. His father was an accomplished speaker of rhyming slang, and Blake was raised listening to talks in which a priest would be called 'cream and yeast', nuns 'currant buns' and being drunk ('pissed') 'Brahms and Liszt'. After graduating from Melbourne University with an honours degree in Latin and English, he worked as a secondary schoolteacher before joining the Australian Department of Defence where he worked as a language instructor. In 1966, he became a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies at Monash University and began to undertake field research and analysis of three moribund three indigenous languages, Kalkatungu, once spoken around Mount Isa in central Queensland and which was the basis for his M.A.thesis (1968), Pitta Pitta and Yalarnnga. He obtained his PhD at Monash in 1975.

He was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1987, and in the following year was appointed to the Foundation Chair in linguistics at La Trobe University. He has recently reconstructed aspects of the extinct dialects of the Kulin languages from fragmentary evidence retrieved from various ethnographic reports made in the 19th century.

Theoretical work

Blake's theoretical work has made a decisive contribution to the long-standing debate over whether the observed distinction between the Pama-Nyungan languages and non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia was genetic or typological.