Linguistics in Australia and the Pacific region has a long tradition of creating and working with collections of community language use. Such corpora provide invaluable data for linguistic analysis, while also representing a trove of knowledge about Australia’s social and cultural history. Many of these corpora, however, are difficult to find and use – they are not registered in searchable catalogues, and they lack published descriptions. To help address this, the Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL) is introducing a new type of article, to be known as a ‘Data Article’, in which the data take the centre stage. The purpose of these articles is threefold: to showcase language collections in Australia and the Pacific region; to share design principles and data management practices; and to highlight some findings that have arisen from the kinds of analyses that such collections have facilitated.

Data Articles should be 6,000-8,000 words total (including references). They should include information about data collection protocols; the community under study; the workflow for establishing the corpus; ethical considerations; data availability; and a summary of relevant findings and implications. A corpus reference (with a doi for the dataset) should also be included.

A sample of Data Articles can be found in the recently published Special Issue on ‘Language Collections in Australia’ (2024, Issue 44, Volume 2-3) (available open access at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=cajl20), edited by Catherine Travis and Li Nguyen. This work was supported by the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA).

Aims and scope of AJL
AJL is the official journal of the Australian Linguistic Society and the premier international journal on language in Australia and the region. The focus of the journal is research on Australian Indigenous languages, Australian Englishes, community languages in Australia, language in Australian society, and languages of the Australian-Pacific region. The journal publishes papers that make a significant theoretical, methodological and/or practical contribution to the field and are accessible to a broad audience.

Peer Review Policy
All research articles in AJL have undergone rigorous double-blind peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by two anonymous referees.

Open Access Publishing
Authors can publish open access in this journal. This will be at no charge if the (first) author is at one of the participating institutions covered. To find out if open access publishing support is currently available at your institution go to https://www.tandfonline.com/openaccess/members.

For information on how to submit your research or data article go to https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cajl20.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics