Manipuri Lamkang, spoken primarily in the southeastern region of Manipur State, India by no more than 5,000 people, is under constant pressure from the dominant state language, Meithei. It is a member of the Northern Kuki-Chin branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. Using National Science Foundation support, Shobhana Chelliah will conduct a two year study of Lamkang to create a searchable archive of 25 hours of naturally occurring speech events, representative of a variety of Lamkang speaker interactions. Dr. Chelliah will work along with Manipuri linguist Dr. Harimohon Thounaojam to collect, transcribe, translate, and analyze Lamkang texts with the help of native speakers. Most grammatical descriptions published in Manipur do not include audio or video recordings. This project will demonstrate the importance and best practice methods of digital audio and video recording. The project will also illustrate a feasible methodology for the use of naturally occurring discourse to guide grammatical analysis. In doing so, it will contest the current paradigm of basing linguistic grammars of Manipuri languages primarily on questionnaires based on Meithei structure. Resulting materials will include a website dedicated to archived and annotated Lamkang texts; accompanying structural and cultural notes; a Lamkang lexicon; and print equivalents of texts in native speaker's accessible scripts.
The Lamkang archive data will document the effects of intense language contact between Lamkang and Meithei and allow a comparison among theories of contact-induced language change. Massive lexical borrowing from Meithei is already changing Lamkang's lexicon and phonology thereby obscuring its relationship to other Kuki languages. Archive data will also be vital for understanding Tibeto-Burman discourse structure and the interaction of syntax with discourse and pragmatics. Archive data will provide a wealth of information for the preparation of pedagogical and cultural materials so that native speakers can use these materials in language programs for the younger speakers.
While the relationship between and history of Indo-European languages is well known, there are many large gaps in our understanding of the relationship between the approximately 250 Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Northeast India. Lack of information on these languages also limits our understanding of how much and in what ways human languages can converge and diverge in structure over time. This project aimed to create a searchable annotated language corpus of Lamkang, one of approximately 30 Tibeto-Burman minority languages spoken in Manipur State, India. Studying Lamkang and other endangered Tibeto-Burman languages of Manipur reveal that they have developed differently over time. For example, it was found that there are curious discontinuities between the complexity of Lamkang word formation and similar processes in adjacent languages: while related languages indicate agreement in number or person between noun and verb with either suffixes or prefixes, Lamkang combines prefixal and suffixal agreement morphologies. The urgency in collecting information on Lamkang is that, like neighboring languages, inter-generational transmission is limited due to intermarriage. This project collected speech samples of various genres, especially those in danger of imminent loss. During the original grant period, 2008-2010 and over a one-year no-cost extension a team of five University of North Texas students, the PI Shobhana Chelliah, and two literate Lamkang speakers recorded, transcribed and translated approximately four hours of audio and six and a half hours of video consisting of 130 annotated recorded speech events from nine female and seven male speakers, approximately 24 to 80 years of age. The language samples include 4 Bible passages (2 versions of Psalm 23, 2 versions of the Prodigal Son, and a translation of the Gospel according to Luke); 11 interview-style conversations; 3 spontaneous conversations; 6 staged conversations; 9 conversations during elicitation sessions; 3 joke-telling sessions; 15 monologues (on the importance of language and culture documentation, traditional practices, and personal experiences); 53 traditional narratives; 1 discussion of proverbs; 8 Pear Story Retellings; 4 wordlists; and 10 written texts. About 80% of these speech samples have been transcribed in a practical orthography. About 40% have been transcribed in narrow phonetic transcription including tone marking. These texts will be available for use by native speakers, linguists and other interested social scientists at the University of North Texas Digital library. In the course of the project, students at the University of North Texas conducted fieldwork with speakers of Lamkang, a language activist and graduate student were trained in methods of language documentation, undergraduate students received research experience, and an undergraduate student presented at a regional conference. Finally, this project served as the basis for a new project DEL project for developing an online dictionary and standardized orthography for Lamkang.
