| John Bowden | |
| Birth Name: | John Frederick Bowden |
| Birth Place: | Australia |
| Nationality: | Australian |
| Occupation: | Linguist |
| Main Interests: | Austronesian and Papuan linguistics |
John Frederick Bowden (born 1958 in Australia[1]) is a linguist who specializes in Austronesian and Papuan linguistics. His main research interests are the languages of eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste.
Bowden obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics at the University of Auckland. In 1992, he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne, where he wrote a grammatical description of the Taba language for his dissertation.[2]
Together with researchers from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia), he documented the Gamkonora language, a Papuan language of Halmahera. He has done research on non-standard Malay lingua francas such as North Moluccan Malay and the dialect of Jakarta. Also, Bowden has extensively studied South Halmahera languages, especially on linguistic typology, language contact, and grammar.[3]
He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. For about 10 years, he was a researcher at the Australian National University. He was also employed as a local director of the Jakarta Field Station of the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.[3]
Selected works by John Bowden:[3]