Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Descriptive Grammar of Karbi

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Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by about half a million speakers located in the Karbi Anglong District of Assam, Northeast India. Its genetic affiliation within the TB family has remained unclear. Previous treatments provide information on the language; however, a detailed documentation and grammatical analysis is needed as a comparative resource for typologists, who seek to understand commonalities and differences between languages and language families of the world. Most of the several hundreds of TB languages have remained un- or under-described to the present day. This project supports fieldwork in Karbi Anglong, and is concerned with the collection and analysis of naturalistic data reflecting how the language is actually spoken in the everyday life of the community. The execution of the project is based on strong collaboration between linguists from the University of Oregon and the Karbi Lammet Amei (Karbi Literary Association). The co-PI will train community members to help with data collection and analysis. This project will produce a modern, detailed descriptive grammar that will also contribute to the understanding of Karbi culture and cultural knowledge, and of the history of Northeast India by working out genetic relationships to other TB languages. The collaborative foundation of the project will create an innovative model of linguist-community interaction, which is not only preferable from an ethical standpoint but also has the important advantage to help accumulate more data and more naturalistic data by training community members to help with recording and analysis of oral texts. A technical linguistic grammar will be the prerequisite for a pedagogical grammar that will help strengthen the status of Karbi, and potentially other minority languages in the area.