Documentation and grammatical description of Yakkha, Nepal

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

Yakkha (ISO-639: ybh) belongs to the Kiranti family (Tibeto-Burman) and is spoken in the Sankhuwasawa District in Nepal. Though officially 14,000 people still speak it, the language is prone to Nepali influence, and scarcely used by the younger generation nowadays. Yakkha was virtually undocumented until the applicant began working on it in 2008.The main aim of the project is to greatly expand the text corpus and grammatical analysis the applicant has compiled to date. This will serve as a basis for writing a grammar of Yakkha, focusing on grammatical relations and clause linkage, to be submitted as a PhD thesis. Primary investigator: Diana Schackow

Project Details


Location: Nepal, Southern Asia, Asia Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): Max Planck Institute Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £14,371.00 Commencement Date: 01/2008
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