Lo-Rig

The five-year project "Lo-Rig: Biactantial agreement in the endangered Gongduk and Monpa languages of Bhutan" is based at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences (SLSCS). The Lo-Rig project will use elicited and natural speech data of two of Bhutan’s unique languages, Gongduk and Monpa, to come up with their exhaustive descriptive grammars. 

Gongduk and Monpa are two Sino-Tibetan languages of Bhutan with no known relatives within the language family. Despite their unique morphosyntactic feature of biactantial verbal agreement, both languages have been largely overlooked in the literature. Gongduk and Monpa are also at a high risk of extinction. There is an urgent need to document the languages and write their descriptive grammars, based on a natural speech corpus, before they disappear forever. 

When a people lose mastery of their mother tongue, they often suffer from a loss of identity, and subsequently a plethora of emotional, mental, and social problems. Realising that the description of the world’s languages can provide indigenous communities with the basic set of materials to promote their linguistic heritage and counteract such negative developments, the United Nations has declared 2023-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. At the same time, linguistic description offers science the opportunity to conduct ground-breaking typological and historical linguistic research. The exhaustive description of Gongduk and Monpa will enable us to compare their verbal agreement systems to those of other Sino-Tibetan languages and infer the implications for the origin and development of verbal agreement and the language family as a whole.

Bhutan’s unique cultural and linguistic heritage forms one of the cornerstones of its national identity and development philosophy. Technological advances present both a risk and an opportunity for safeguarding this heritage. The Lo-Rig project team will 
apply and develop innovative methods that speed up and simplify the transcription of recorded texts, using technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition, and software applications for the subsequent analysis and dissemination of under-resourced, endangered languages. They will also train Bhutanese linguists, contributing to a more sustainable future of Bhutan’s languages, and produce outputs for language promotion.