Whence Thangmi? Historical ethnography and comparative morphology

In this contribution, we draw attention to prevailing issues that many speakers of Indigenous North American languages face when typing their languages, and identify examples of typefaces that have been developed and harnessed by historically marginalized language communities. We offer an overview of the field of typeface design as it serves…[Read more]

Drawing on examples from the linguistically-diverse Himalayan region, in this contribution we explore three main questions. First, we ask how language boundaries both contribute to and defy the imagination of the nation-state. Second, we investigate how such boundaries are transcended and become redefined through increased mobility and…[Read more]

Offering the first written reflection in English outlining and critically assessing the work of the Translation and Interpretation Unit in the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), this theoretically-informed and practically-oriented article outlines the framing documents and vision that led to the establishment of UNMIN in 2007. In addition,…[Read more]

The changing landscape of publishing in Nepal: Interview with Bidur Dangol

This paper describes the process and outcomes of a project focused on community centred reclamation of plant-based knowledge in the Kwak̓wala language from previously published materials as well as new documentation with Kwak̓wala speaking Elders. The paper describes our research process resulting in the documentation of 300 plant word names and p…[Read more]

In their handling of colour, Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayan region show multiple lexical similarities to one another as well as apparent influences from more dominant languages such as Hindi, Nepali, Tibetan, and Chinese. As an understudied family, Tibeto-Burman languages also serve as an important site to explore modern colour theory…[Read more]

On linguistic borders: Official language policy in settler-colonial nations

Digital access for language and culture in First Nations communities

Cracked earth: Indigenous responses to Nepal’s earthquakes

In 2013, I piloted a course in which students used Web-based tools to explore underdocumented collections of Himalayan materials at Yale University. Through class-based research and contextualization, I set students the goal of augmenting existing metadata and designing media-rich, virtual tours of the collections that could be incorporated into…[Read more]

Orality and technology, or the bit and the byte: The work of the World Oral Literature Project

As a topic, repatriation has ignited debates for years amongst scholars, local communities, and collecting institutions. The digital age has intensified and changed these discussions in ways that are sometimes unpredictable. One such shift is away from legal definitions and assumptions about repatriation to more inclusive notions of digital return…[Read more]

Up to half of the world’s 6,500 languages spoken today may be extinct by the end of this century. Most of these endangered languages are oral speech forms, with little if any traditional written literature. If undocumented, these tongues—each representing a unique insight into human cognition and its most powerful defining feature, lan…[Read more]

On 19 January 2012, the workshop After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge was held at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian’s Understanding the American Experience and Valuing World Cul…[Read more]

The Digital Himalaya Project is a collection, storage and dissemination portal for scholarly content and research findings about the Himalayan region. The project website connects a worldwide user community to a vast corpus of digital resources from or about India, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau for free and easy download – without p…[Read more]

Nepal’s political transition to a democratic federal republic remains incomplete. A November 2011 agreement on post-conflict integration and rehabilitation offers reason for hope. Continued disagreements over the structure of the federal state and its form of government have delayed the constitution-making process. Corruption, impunity, and weak i…[Read more]

Silent witness

Interview with Kesar Lall

Facilitated by an infusion of funding from philanthropic sources, descriptive linguists have been galvanized to document the world’s languages before they disappear without record. Linguists have responded to the “crisis of documentation” (Dobrin, L. M. & Berson, J. (2011), “Speakers and Language Documentation”, in The Cambridge Handbook of Endang…[Read more]