Alexandra Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University. Her books include Language Contact in Amazonia (2003) and The Amazonian languages (co-edited with R. M. W. Dixon, Cambridge University Press, 1999). She has done extensive fieldwork on numerous Arawak languages from Brazil and has published a collection of texts in Tariana and also a Tariana-Portuguese dictionary.