Research Associate
Languages of the Himalayas, languages of Bhutan and Nepal, linguistic diversity, diachronic linguistics, anthropological linguistics, evolution of language, endangered languages, descriptive linguistics, linguistic relativity.
The aim of my dissertation is a first grammatical description of the Nachiring language spoken in eastern Nepal in the Himalayan foothills, including a dictionary and a text collection. Nachiring belongs to the Kiranti subgroup of the Trans-Himalayan (a.k.a. Tibeto-Burman) language family and shows morphosyntactically complex, biactantial verbal agreement typical of Kiranti languages. Nachiring is a highly endangered language in that it is spoken by max. 100 people, the majority belonging to the grandparents’ generation, and in that its speakers are under constant and heavy pressure to assimilate both lingustically and culturally to the national language Nepali (Indo-Aryan).
