Documentation of an endangered language: Kunashi

Time period:

1 January 2015 – 31 December 2018

Project leader:

Anju Saxena

Project member:

Lars Borin, Bernard Comrie

Funder:

Swedish Research Council

Type of award:

Project grant

Total funding:

5,012,000 SEK

The project aims to provide a fuller documentation of Kunashi, a "definitely endangered" (UNESCO) unwritten and undescribed Tibeto-Burman language spoken in only one village - Malana - in the Kullu district in India. The inaccessibility of Malana has earlier contributed to the maintenance of its traditional culture/language, which is now threatened. The building of a hydro-electric plant is having a devastating effect on community´s traditional lifestyle (including language). It will soon be too late to record the Kunashi language. The geographical location of Malana (Malana is surrounded by Indo-Aryan speaking villages), together with the unique linguistic make-up of Kunashi raise questions concerning its genetic classification, factors contributing to its special linguistic characteristics and about its pre-history, crying out for more detailed investigation before it is too late. The project will place the documentation of Kunashi within a context of a dialect survey of this region comprising 10 sites. The project plans to use multiple research tools and methodologies to produce e.g.: (i) A 5000-sense open-access digital interactive lexicon, (ii) an annotated corpus (including audio and video files), (iii) a comprehensive grammar, and (iv) material for the speech community. The project is a close collaboration between the members of the speech communities, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Gothenburg and Uppsala University.