Rate My Professor Arvind Iyengar

Dr. Arvind Iyengar is a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New England, affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, India, complemented by international professional experience in sales and translation. Transitioning to linguistics, Arvind graduated from UNE's fully online Master of Applied Linguistics with Honours program and earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution. His doctoral thesis, "Sindhī multiscriptality, past and present," examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of community acceptance of the Sindhi language's multiple scripts. As a former online student himself, Arvind informs his teaching with insights into the challenges faced by off-campus learners, promoting equitable access for students from diverse backgrounds.

Arvind's research specializes in grapholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology, and language and dialect description. His work centers on the Sindhi language of South Asia, encompassing descriptive and sociolinguistic analyses of its orthographies and writing systems; he is authoring a scholarly monograph on Sindhi's historical and contemporary scripts. He also documents the Hebbar Iyengar variety of Tamil and supports community efforts to produce pedagogical materials. In his teaching portfolio at UNE, he coordinates LING381/LING581 "Writing Systems of the World," the first unit of its kind in any Australian university, and teaches units including LING365/LING565 Phonetics and Phonology, LING369/LING569 Morphology and Syntax, and LING353/LING553 The English Language. Notable publications include "Writing skills for undergraduate students in Fiji: Tackling educational inequalities, facilitating epistemic access" (2023), "A diachronic analysis of Sindhi multiscriptality" (Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2020), "Like Community, Like Language: Seventy-Five Years of Sindhi in Post-Partition India" (Journal of Sindhi Studies, 2021), "Variation in Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī Sindhī orthographies: An overview" (Written Language & Literacy, 2018), and "More matters of typology: Alphasyllabaries, abugidas and related vowelled segmentaries" (Written Language & Literacy, 2023).