Reflections on language documentation in India

The last twenty years have seen efforts to support the study of minority and lesser-studied languages of India from varied stakeholders: these include the Indian government, international and Indian nonprofit organizations, indigenous and state-level cultural and language committees and institutes, and individuals with a passion to preserve and document their cultures and languages. Their efforts have led to mixed success due to conflicting ideologies, history, and resource availability (Annamalai 2003). Basing my observations on my research, personal experience and engagement with language documentation activities in the country, I provide an overview of the current state of language study and my hopes and efforts for future of language documentation and description in India.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Exploring language archiving education for information professionals and interdisciplinary collaboration to support information access

In the past two decades, federal agencies such as National Science Foundation and Institute for Museum and Library Services have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, multiple studies have demonstrated the gap between the way language data is currently organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that data -- and how it should be organized and represented -- by data creators and collectors such as language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper provides a review of the relevant literature, presents some work of our interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers and practitioners to address this gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions

Pretty Derivational Morphemes All in a Row

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Place of Morphology in a Grammar (1992), pp. 287-29

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives: LangArc 2023

Article focusing on metadata creation for photographs in language archives. It was presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held on June 30, 2023 as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023

Cross-Language Comparison of Mismatched Annotation in Interlinear-Glossed Texts

This presentation explores the variation in interlinear-glossed text (IGT) in 5 closely related South-Central Tibeto-Burman languages with verb stem alternation, reduplicated adverbial modifiers, and pre-verbal directionals. While IGT is a rich representation of language, IGT for even closely related languages can look markedly different due to individual linguists’ divergent analyses. In comparing the discrepancies between representations of such features, we gain insight into the underlying analytic thinking of the annotator to reexamine and improve analyses

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives: LangArc 2023

Conference proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held on June 30, 2023 as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023. It includes 10 peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the workshop and an introduction from the workshop organizers

Excrescent vowels in Lamkang prefix sequences

Article examines the nature of the super-short vowel-like segments between the C- prefixes of the Lamkang language by combining acoustic analysis with speakers' intuitions about syllable structure. The authors argue that an accurate phonetic description of Lamkang vowels must include these super-short vowels, as well as long and short vowels, which are phonemically distinct

CoRSAL Occasional Publications

This inaugural volume of the CoRSAL Occasional Publications is a collection of traditional and personal texts in Thadou, Saihriem, Hrangkhol, and Ranglong, four languages of the Barak Valley region of Assam, India. The narratives were collected, transcribed, and translated by Dr. Pauthang Haokip, who is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India and a member of the Thadou community. This text collection includes grammatical analysis presented in the form of interlinear glossing and accompanied by audio recordings in the Languages of the Barak Valley collection in the Computational Resources of South Asian Languages Archive. The collection will be of lasting interest to historical, comparative, and typological linguists, as well as speakers connecting or reconnecting with cultural and linguistic traditions

Organization of knowledge and information in digital archives of language materials

This article reports the first empirical investigation of various dimensions of organization and representation of recorded knowledge and information in language archives. The study used a combination of semi-structured interviews and content analysis. Results demonstrate that, while some of the phenomena related to organization of information in language archives are specific to these types of archives, others are more typical and have been addressed by libraries in past research and practice

CoRSAL Occasional Publications

This extremely valuable collection of texts in the Lahu language represents the language and culture in the 1960’s, a time when the heritage language and culture were still vibrant and not yet globalized, hence the title Window on a Vanished World. It is also one of the largest collections of texts in any Tibeto-Burman language. The texts are available as a book and online with the audio (originally from 1960’s magnetic tape). This is a massive achievement for all involved in the recording, conversion, and editing