John Lynch, born 8 July 1946, in Sydney, Australia, is a linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 specializing in Oceanic languages. He is an emeritus professor of Pacific Languages and the former Director of the Pacific Languages Unit at the University of the South Pacific

University of the South Pacific

The University of the South Pacific is a public university with a number of locations spread throughout a dozen countries in Oceania. It is an international centre for teaching and research on Pacific culture and environment. USP's academic programmes are recognised worldwide, attracting students...

 in Port Vila

Port Vila

Port Vila is the capital and largest city of Vanuatu. Situated on the south coast of the island of Efate, in Shefa Province, the city population at last was 29,356, an increase of 55% on the previous census result . This suggests a 2007 population of about 40,000 or around 65% of the province's...

, Vanuatu

Vanuatu

Vanuatu , officially the Republic of Vanuatu , is an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is some east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, west of Fiji, and southeast of the Solomon Islands, near New Guinea.Vanuatu was...

. Prior to moving to Vanuatu, he served the University of Papua New Guinea

University of Papua New Guinea

The University of Papua New Guinea was established by ordinance of the Australian administration in 1965. This followed the Currie Commission which had enquired into higher education in Papua New Guinea...

 for 21 years, the last five as Vice-Chancellor. His areas of focus are languages of Vanuatu

Languages of Vanuatu

Vanuatu has three official languages, English, French, and Bislama, a creole language evolved from English. Bislama is the first language of many urban ni-Vanuatu, that is, the residents of Port Vila and Luganville. It is the most common second language elsewhere in the Vanuatu islands...

; history of languages of the Pacific; pidgin

Pidgin

A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...

 and creole

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

 languages; language change

Language change

Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...

; dictionaries; orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 design. He is currently the editor of the journal Oceanic Linguistics

Oceanic Linguistics

Oceanic Linguistics is an international academic journal devoted to the study of the thousand-odd indigenous languages of the Oceanic area and parts of Southeast Asia, including the aboriginal languages of Australia, the Papuan languages of New Guinea, and the languages of the Austronesian family...

.

External links

• Pacific Languages Unit