Robert M. W. Dixon

Robert Malcolm Ward Dixon (Gloucester, England, 25 January 1939) is a Professor of Linguistics at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland, and formerly Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

Dixon was born in Gloucester, in the west of England, in 1939, and as a child lived at Stroud and later at Bramcote near Nottingham, where his father became principal of the People's College of Further Education. He was educated at Nottingham High School and then at the University of Oxford, where he took his first degree in mathematics in 1960, and finally at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a Research Fellow in Statistical Linguistics in the English department from July 1961 to September 1963. After that until September 1964 he did field work for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in north-east Queensland, working on several of the Aboriginal languages of Australia, but taking a particular interest in Dyirbal.

Dixon has written on many areas of linguistic theory and fieldwork, being particularly noted for his work on the languages of Australia. He has published grammars of Dyirbal and Yidiny as well as non-Australian languages such as Boumaa Fijian and Jarawara.

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