The goal of this research project is to document and describe Miji, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 4,000 people in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Current trends of globalization, specifically national integration and the spread of education in Hindi and English in India, have caused Miji language proficiency to decrease significantly within the younger generations. As a result, older tribal members have become increasingly concerned about the future state of their heritage language. Continuing such patterns of language use in this community will surely result in the eventual and total extinction of the Miji language. This reality is made even more threatening by the fact that no written orthography has ever been developed for this language, which could allow for the preservation of culturally and/or linguistically relevant texts.
In order to document this language, Mr. Daniel Wood will spend two six-month long periods living among the Miji in their native communities where he will attempt gain communicative proficiency in Miji. Linguistic documentation is a collaborative effort between the linguist and the language community. Mr. Wood will train interested members of the community in basic linguistic documentation and analysis. This will not only allow the community to contribute to the documentation project, but it will empower them to spearhead their own language-based projects in the future. The linguistic data that will be collected via audio and video recording will be the basis for a descriptive grammar of Miji. Other expected end-products for this research project include a trilingual Miji-English-Hindi dictionary, a collection of transcribed texts glossed in English, and a written orthography designed in collaboration with the Miji community. As Miji remains a drastically under-studied and under-documented language, such publications will be the first of their kind, benefitting both the linguistic and Miji communities.
The proposal envisaged sustained fieldwork by the graduate student/co-PI in Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, with the goal of producing a comprehensive descriptive grammar of Miji, an undocumented, endangered Tibeto-Burman language of the eastern Himalayas. The research activities supported by this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant ended prematurely without result due to illness of the co-PI. At the begining of his first field trip the graduate student/co-PI became seriously ill and had to abandon the trip and return to the United States. His health problems continued, and eventually resulted in his withdrawal from the project, and ultimately from the graduate program in Linguistics at the University of Oregon. Thus he will not be preparing a dissertation, and the project which was funded by this grant was discontinued. Although the project had to be discontinued before it had seriously begun, one useful outcome is that local contacts have been established in the Miji community, and with relevant government offices and officers in Arunachal Pradesh. We hope that it will be possible to try again. All unexpended funds from the project -- aside from the travel costs of Daniel Wood's first field trip to Arunachal Pradesh -- were returned to the NSF.
