ICAAL 8 is coming up soon in Thailand! The 8th International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics will be held in Chiang Mai (Thailand) on August 29-31, 2019, hosted by The Myanmar Center at the Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University.

View conference website & program here.

Living Tongues linguists will be presenting their research findings at this event. Dr. Gregory Anderson and Mr. Opino Gomango will present a paper entitled “Grammatical case and referent indexing in Sora-Juray.” Dr. Bikram Jora will present “A typology of grammatical, local/directional and instrumental markers in Kherwarian languages.” Furthermore, Dr. Luke Horo and Dr. Priyankoo Sarmah will present their joint work “Acoustic Analysis of Rhythm in Sora.” All papers will contribute to the understanding of the Munda language family, which is a branch of Austroasiatic.

Austroasiatic languages are spoken in a vast area stretching from Vietnam in the East to eastern India in the West, and Northern India in the North to Malaysia and the Nicobar Islands in the South. With Khmer in Cambodia and Vietnamese in Vietnam, two Austroasiatic languages have official status, while Mon and Khmer are among the earliest documented languages of Southeast Asia, with inscriptions going back to the 6th century CE. In spite of their linguistic and historical importance, the study of Austroasiatic languages is much less advanced than other languages families of the area.