Claire Louise Bowern (/ˈboʊərn/ BOH-ərn) is a linguist who works with Australian Indigenous languages.
[2] Bowern received her PhD from Harvard University in 2004, under the advisement of Jay Jasanoff and Calvert Watkins.
Her dissertation was about Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language, and its verbal morphology, both diachronically and synchronically.
[4] The thesis also included a sketch grammar of Bardi, as well as the first attempted reconstruction of Proto-Nyulnyulan.
[7][8] The name for the database was inspired by both the motivations of the project and the word for "echidna" in many Western Desert languages, tyirilya.