PHD Muhammad Zakaria

Research profile

I specialize in language documentation, historical linguistics, grammaticalization, and language contact, particularly in South and Southeast Asia (https://unibe-ch2.academia.edu/MuhammadZakaria/edit). My current research interest includes the evolutionary pathways between (comitative) applicative, causative and middle, and syntactic reanalysis as a manifestation of verb-stem alternations. I am also interested in ritual languages and comparative literary analysis for establishing genetic affiliation. My colleagues and students at Independent University of Bangladesh and I are currently developing an archive which will host user-friendly and searchable corpora of South and Southeast Asian languages.

Currently, I am an Advanced Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bern, where I teach linguistics and lead a research project on The History of Verb Stem Alternations in South Central Tibeto-Burman (snf.ch). I earned my PhD in Linguistics from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, with a dissertation on the grammar of Hyow (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/handle/10356/73237), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 4,000 people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. After my PhD, I have documented two more languages, Laitu and Lawktu, as part of my postdoc projects. The work on Laitu, a Southeastern South Central TIbeto-Burman (also known as Kuki-Chin) language spoken in the Rakhine state of Burma, is archived at ELAR (http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0010-7A7E-A).

I have held several positions, both teaching and research, at different universities, including the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), Independent University, Bangladesh, and Osaka University. I am actively involved in efforts to document endangered languages, develop digital archives, and support communities in preserving their linguistic heritage.