Linguistic description between Kleinstaaterei and the Word of God: A case study of the 1838 Lutheran mission to South Australia

James McElvenny and Gerhard Rüdiger
Universität Siegen | Independent scholar

This paper presents a case study of the linguistic work conducted by the German Lutheran missionaries Christian G. Teichelmann (1807–1888) and Clamor W. Schürmann (1815–1893) in producing grammars and dictionaries of Indigenous languages of South Australia, and the so-called ‘Adelaide School’ of linguistic description that emerged through their efforts and those of their missionary and colonial colleagues. The political circumstances through which the Lutheran mission to South Australia came into being and the material conditions under which missionary activity was undertaken are examined. This is followed by an investigation of the Adelaide School’s place in international scientific networks and its broader contributions to linguistic scholarship. Comparisons are drawn with other instances of linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in Australia and the Pacific of the time.

Publication history

Date received: 24 March 2025

Date accepted: 17 September 2025

Published online: 29 September 2025

Table of contents

Recent scholarship on the history of the documentation and description of Australian languages (e.g., Stockigt 2024; McGregor 2008) has revealed extensive linguistic activity in nineteenth-century Australia, undertaken mostly by European missionaries and government officials who were recording the languages of the Aboriginal people they were sent proselytize or ‘protect’. It has also been shown that missionaries in Australia and the Pacific were frequently connected to worldwide scientific networks through which they disseminated the results of their linguistic and ethnographic researches and received inspiration and support from metropolitan scholars (see, e.g., Gardner and McConvell 2015; Ganter 2018). This paper seeks to contribute to these strands of historiography by undertaking a case study of the beginnings of the ‘Adelaide School’ of linguistics in the infant colony of South Australia from 1838/39 to the mid-1840s.

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