Approximately fifty Kuki-Chin languages are spoken in the border region of Burma, India, and Bangladesh. Recent years have seen an intensification of research on a small percentage of these languages, which form a part of the Tibeto-Burman language family; considerable work is still needed to document the remaining ones. The study of these languages is at a unique juncture. Political developments in the region have led to conditions where it will be possible, and even more urgent, to engage in serious documentation work for the understudied languages of the group. Thoughtful guidance to new fieldworkers in how to effectively document and describe Kuki-Chin languages would speed up documentation efforts and produce descriptions that lend themselves to cross-corpora comparison.
With support from NSF, Dr. Peterson will hold a day-long workshop on issues in Kuki-Chin linguistics at Dartmouth College, in conjunction with the 46th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (http://sites.dartmouth.edu/icstll46/). Specialists will take stock of their understanding of the major grammatical systems of these languages and will discuss standard terminology for coding common Kuki-Chin grammatical phenomena. The resulting papers and recommendations will be assembled in a volume intended to serve as a field manual for future investigators of Kuki-Chin languages, including members of the emerging academic communities in India and Burma.
The devotion of an entire workshop to Kuki-Chin languages will contribute to societal awareness of them and their speakers. The resulting guide will become an essential tool for teaching about the study of these languages and will be useful for the development of orthographies and literacy materials for Kuki-Chin language communities.
Nearly fifty Kuki-Chin languages, spoken in the Burma/India/Bangladesh border region, belong to the Tibeto-Burman language family. Only a few of these languages have been subject to significant amounts of description and documentation; a number of them are endangered. This award supported a one-day workshop on issues in Kuki-Chin Linguistics held in conjunction with the 46th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, which took place at Dartmouth College in August 2013. At the workshop, ten scholars presented invited papers on selected aspects of research on the structure of the languages, and engaged in discussions regarding standardization of terminology. The papers from the workshop, and additional papers to be solicited from scholars who were unable to attend the workshop, will be collected in a volume which will serve as a manual for future field research in these languages. Besides assembling the collective knowledge of these individual specialists in the languages, the workshop allowed for interaction between scholars, especially international participants, who only rarely, if ever, have had the opportunity to exchange ideas in person. It is hoped that the projected volume of papers will be of use not only to linguists who work on languages of the Kuki-Chin group, but that it will serve as a model for the development of resources by other sholars working on similar groupings of languages. The volume will also be of use to language communities in activities such as orthography development and literacy promotion, two things that are highly useful in language preservation efforts.
