2017 was a big year for us! We conducted hundreds of hours of fieldwork among Korku, Nihali, Birhor, Gta’ and Gutob speakers in India, published two dictionaries for minority languages in Nigeria, presented at numerous scientific conferences around the globe, and wrapped up research and analysis for two major language documentation projects for two endangered Munda languages (Gta’ and Gutob) for which we also published talking dictionaries and comprehensive archives. See a detailed list of projects & links below.

THANK YOU to all of our researchers, fellows, interns and volunteers, as well as the dozens of speakers and collaborators who spent countless hours recording, editing, transcribing and analyzing words and phrases with us. Thank you to our donors who help keep moving our projects moving forward.

We are striving to stay sustainable in 2018, and we need your help to continue our programs documenting endangered languages in Asia and the Pacific. Please consider making an end-of-year contribution today and help us stay strong in the coming year.

LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION

Gta’ language | India
Since 2013, we have been steadily working on the documentation of Gta’, an endangered Munda language spoken in India. We are pleased that the Gta’ Talking Dictionary is now online! We currently have 6800+ words and phrases in the dictionary, with many more to come. Listen to words such as “gusoʔober” (Indian Pangolin) and “ɖweʔ lgoʔ koʔ-ɽeʔ” (long legged greater flamingo) right here:

Gta’ is also known as Gata’, Didey, Didayi, Didei, Dire, Gataq, Geta’, Getaq, and Gta Asa. The words and phrases were collected, annotated and transcribed by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Opino Gomango. The language documentation materials were archived by Anna Luisa Daigneault with digital assistance from Kristen Wenz, Keith Burgelin, Katie Li and Aliya Slayton. This project was in part made possible by Grant Award PD 50025-13 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To see more from the Gta’ documentation project, visit our complete Gta’ archive available on PARADISEC.

Gutob language | India
Since 2015, we have been working with our field team in India to document Gutob, an endangered Munda language spoken in Odisha State. We are pleased to report that we have wrapped up the collection of materials this year, and also launched a new Gutob Talking Dictionary. 

Furthermore, the videos, audio recordings and images from fieldwork among Gutob speakers were archived online with PARADISEC. The language documentation materials include an extensive lexical and grammatical collection in the form of recorded words, phrases, and oral texts. These were collected, annotated and transcribed by Gregory D. S. Anderson, Opino Gomango, Bikram Jora, Bondu Kirsani, Tankadhar Sisa and Gajendra Pradhan, and archived by Anna Luisa Daigneault with digital assistance from Katie Li, Shelby Sands, Murilo da Silva Barros, Henry Wu, Hannah Bishop, and Michael Horlick. The Gutob language documentation project was funded by National Science Foundation Grant Award #1500092.

Here are some images of Gutob speakers photographed by Opino Gomango in Gangare ugom (Kangapada) village, p/o Lamtaput, p/s Machkund, District Koraput, India.

Olùkùmi and Owé languages | Nigeria
As you may remember if you were following us this year, we conducted a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund the publication of two first-ever dictionaries for Olùkùmi and Owé, endangered languages spoken in Nigeria. Authored by Living Tongues Fellow, Nigerian linguist Dr. Bolanle Arokoyo, these dictionaries were well received by the communities, and will serve speakers for generations to come. In particular, to our amazement, the Owé dictionary was a huge hit and its launch received a reception worthy of a Hollywood film! Thanks to our donors for helping make this publication a reality.

To learn more about the Owé language, check out Dr. Arokoyo’s Owé Lexicon on her website. 

PRESENTATIONS & RESEARCH 

2017 was a great year for everyone Living Tongues Institute, in particular for the indigenous scholars who took part in many international conferences.

Dr. Bikram Jora
In early May 2017, Living Tongues South Asia Project Coordinator Dr. Bikram Jora gave two joint presentations at the Twenty Seventh Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 27) in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The first paper, in collaboration with linguist Luke Horo, was entitled Phonetic realisation of a Schwa like vowel “x” in Santali and the next, in collaboration with Living Tongues Director Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, was entitled Introduction to Birhor verb morphology.

In August, Dr. Bikram Jora attended an international linguistics seminar on expressives in Tokyo, Japan. Along with other scholars of Munda languages, he proposed a joint Indo-Japanese research group called the International Munda Studies Network.

Opino Gomango
In July 2017, Living Tongues Sora Project Coordinator Opino Gomango gave a presentation at the National Language Conference, which took place at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) in Berhampur, India. His presentation was about the current status of the Sora-Juray dialect continuum. In September, Gomango gave another Sora-related presentation on language learning at the National Seminar conference organized by Berhampur University.

In November, Gomango presented his Sora sociolinguistic research at the 3rd International Linguistics Conference in Sri Lanka, and later that month travelled to the 38th Annual Conference of the Linguistic Society of Nepal, where he presented a paper on Sora noun incorporation.

Dr. Greg Anderson
At the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL23), Living Tongues Director Greg Anderson gave a talk entitled “Why morphology matters in comparative-historical linguistics, phylogenetics and language prehistory research” which was on the classification of Koro-Aka, spoken in India.

Dr. Anderson also gave the keynote lecture at the 1st International Conference of Munda Linguistics held at Deccan College, Pune, India, in March 2017 on the topic of “Proto-Munda in South Asian and Austroasiatic contexts”.

He gave an invited talk at the Freie Universität Berlin entitled “The ecologies of language endangerment and the threat to linguistic diversity in Asia”. This was the first public discussion of his new model of the ecology of language endangerment to explain global and regional trends and the geographic distribution of language shift, or in other words, the where and the why of the Global Language Hotspots model.

In November, Dr. Greg Anderson spoke at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands. The title of his talk was, “Towards a semantic typology of complex predicates: Auxiliary verb constructions vs. serial verb constructions vs. light verb constructions.”

Co-presentations by Dr. Greg Anderson & Dr. Bikram Jora
Dr. Greg Anderson and Dr. Bikram Jora gave a joint paper “If you eat beef you cannot learn: Internal neocolonialism, ‘development’ and the languages of ‘primitive tribals’ in Jharkhand and Odisha states, India” at the SALSA conference in Austin, Texas. This paper was selected to appear in the forthcoming published proceedings of the conference. In May 2017, Anderson and Jora also presented the paper “Talking Dictionaries for ‘tribal’ languages of Jharkhand, Odisha and Arunachal Pradesh” at the Documentary Linguistics: Asian Perspectives (DLAP-2) conference held at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

They also gave presentations at the 7th International Conference on Austro-Asiatic Linguistics (ICAAL 7) in Kiel, Germany. The title of their joint talk was “Interdependencies of negation, TAM marking and person-indexing in the Munda languages”. Dr. Jora also gave another joint presentation entitled “Lexical distance between Mundari, Santali and Sadri and the impact of language migration” together with Living Tongues research associate Mr. Luke Horo, a specialist in phonetics, and Dr. Anderson gave another joint presentation with Dr. Hiram Ring entitled “On the prosody of Khasian languages in relation to Munda”. Here are some glimpses from the event. All photos by Hiram Ring of NTU in Singapore.

In August, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Jora presented a paper entitled “Why morphology matters in comparative-historical linguistic reconstruction and phylogenetics” at the 23rd International Conference of Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, TX.

Dr. Mark Donohue
We were pleased to welcome Dr. Mark Donohue as our new Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific region this year.

His work on the northern Nepalese languages, and ongoing work on Bhutanese languages, informed Mark’s talk at the Workshop on Tibetic languages of Nepal, held in Kathmandu on 17 April this year. This preceded continuing work with the languages of the Nubri valley, in northern Nepal.

Mark has been working on traditional stories and personal remniscences from the last speaker of Kusunda, a language isolate formerly spoken by hunter-gatherers across central Nepal. This year he was invited to talk at the University of Oxford about some of the results of the descriptive and analytical work on the language. Mark and co-author Bhojraj Gautam are finalising a collection of Kusunda texts for publication in 2018. Following the visit to Oxford, Mark gave the plenary talk at the Manchester Phonology Meeting at the end of May.

Working with Naijing Liu, Mark has presented two papers on aspects of phonology from the Himalayas and from China: in June they presented a poster in Taiwan at the International Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (‘Tianjin Tone Sandhi: Looking Beyond Pitch ‘), and in November they talked on ‘The unusual feature of [voice] in the Himalayan language of Tsum’ at the Linguistic Society of Nepal’s 38th annual conference in Kathmandhu.

Donohue spent the month of July 2017 teaching Typology at the bi-annual Linguistic Institute, this year held at the University of Kentucky. Later in the year, the Association for Linguistic Typology‘s annual conference was held in Australia. Mark Donohue co-taught (with Dineke Schokkin) a one-day introduction to Austronesian languages, which was attended by 30 people of all levels from around the world.

With collaborator Siva Kalyan, Mark Donohue also presented a talk on ‘Mapping hotspots of morphosyntactic and phonological divergence’, examining where the greatest differences lie between languages; sadly, many of those languages that are most different from their neighbours are also the most endangered. Mark and Siva also presented a poster mapping out the degrees of variation between languages (‘Principal components analysis and 3D visualization of typological variation’), allowing us to visualise which languages are more or less similar to each other, and where those languages can be found (see the map below).

This allows us to appreciate just how different languages are from each other, and how varied they can be in some regions of the world; compare the lack of differentiation displayed between most of the the different languages of Europe with the great diversity of colours on the map in some regions.

Map: Principal components analysis and 3D visualization of typological variation

This map is also available on a t-shirt; please enquire about sizes and costs. Email mark@livingtongues.org to place an order.

Mark Donohue has also been involved with a number of small communities in northern Nepal that were badly affected by the 2015 earthquakes that wreaked so much damage across that country. Rather than imposing plans from the outside, one project mixing academic and community work has seen interview teams from a number of different ethnic groups return to their own villages and surrounds and record the experiences of the people who lived through the earthquakes. One academic result of this work is soon to appear in Collaborative Anthropologies: co-authored with Geoff Childs, Sienna Craig, Dubi Nanda Dhakal and Kristine Hildebrandt, the article ‘Narrating disaster through participatory research: perspectives from post-earthquake Nepal’ describes the advantages and challenges of not dictating models for involvement, but working with local communities to allow their voices to dictate the research agenda.

Image: Sainli Tamang, from Sipali, describes her experiences on April 25, 2015 when the first earthquake struck. Photo by Mark Donohue.

Other Updates

New Program Director
We are pleased to announce that our Development Officer, Anna Luisa Daigneault, who has been working with us since 2011, has been promoted to the position of Program Director, and will oversee all program activities in 2018.

Chulym Archive
For those of you who are familiar with our documentation work in Siberia, you will be pleased to note that the language documentation collection for Chulym (a Turkic language spoken by a small community of speakers in Siberia) has been updated and is available online at the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London. Explore the Chulym archive here.

Upcoming Events
The NWAV-AP5 conference will be held at the University of Queensland, Australia, on 1-3 February 2018. Dr. Anderson, Dr. Jora and Mr. Gomango will be presenting a join paper entitled, “Towards a typology of contact-driven morphosyntactic restructuring in Munda languages.”

Recent Press

• Fast Company interviewed Anna Luisa Daigneault about learning endangered languages online.
• Dr. Gregory Anderson spoke about endangered languages with Harvard Political Review recently. He observed, “We have a fairly narrow set of windows of opportunity to understand how language develops and how humans divide their collective experience and metaphorize it. The more of these windows that get permanently closed, the less we’ll ever be able to know about what is and what isn’t possible and why.”
• Anna Luisa Daigneault was interviewed by The Atlantic for a compelling article about Maori language revitalization through music.

Thanks for reading! We wish you a happy new year in 2018.

Best wishes,

– The Living Tongues team