Events
Fieldwork Visit to Daksa village, November-December 2025.
Between 28th November and 6th December, the project PI Tim and the Gongduk RA Rinchen visited Daksa village under Gongdue block, Mongar district. They attended the Kharphu festival, which was held there on the 4th of December.
Fieldwork Visit to Riti village, October 2025.
Between 27th of October and 1st November, the project PI Tim and the Monkha RA Sonam visited the village of Riti under Jigmechoeling block, Sarpang district. Riti is located 88 kilometers from Gelephu city. The road is only partially paved, and the journey takes anything between six and ten hours depending on the road condition, with roadblocks frequently occurring, in particular at the place called Boxcut on the Gelephu to Zhemgang highway.
Riti village was established around 80 years ago by Monpa people who came from Rukha village in Wangdue Phodrang district. The Monkha varieties spoken in Rukha and Riti are very similar. The people of Riti depend almost completely on large cardamom as a cash crop.
In Riti, Sonam and Tim conducted an awareness session with a representative of each of the 15 Monpa households, explaining the purpose of the Lo-Rig project and the project’s goals and objectives. The assembled community members were requested to cooperate and asked their understanding of and permission for the research. They were also able to ask any questions or raise any concerns they may have. The community members raised the point that on several previous occasions, Western, Japanese and Bhutanese people had come to ask them many questions about their language, made recordings, took notes, and even drew their blood. But afterwards, they heard nothing anymore. No results, books or other outcomes were shared with them, which greatly disappointed them. Sonam and Tim assured the people that the Lo-Rig project would strive for tangible outcomes for the community as well, which greatly pleased the assembled public.
Subsequently, Sonam and Tim made some recordings of narratives by the two most senior community members, Ap Singye and Ap Tandin. They also recorded a wordlist from Tenzin and Peday.
Research Assistant Training, October-November 2025.
Between the 6th of October and the 24th of October and between the 17th and 28th of November the project PI Tim conducted a training for the two Bhutanese RAs Sonam and Rinchen. The training commenced with explaining the Lo-Rig project goals and objectives, the project staff, and the work packages and planning for the five years of the project.
The RAs were also introduced to the field of linguistics, including topics such as basic phonetics and phonology and the IPA, parts of speech, verbal agreement including the project’s focus on biactantial/polypersonal verbal agreement, orthographies and orthography development, and the linguistic diversity of Bhutan.
The two RAs were familiarised with important topics such as research ethics, data protection, informed consent, open access, and cybersecurity. The Participant Information Leaflets (PILs) and Informed Consent Forms developed at Trinity College Dublin were translated into Dzongkha and subsequently summarized and translated into Gongduk and Monkha.
The RAs were introduced to best practices in linguistic fieldwork. They translated the ‘regionally relevant wordlist’ into Dzongkha and Tshangla and practiced elicitation and transcription in their respective languages Monkha and Gongduk.
The RAs also practiced with the recording equipment, using it in different contexts and conditions. A field visit was made to Folk Heritage Museum in Canggangkha, Thimphu, to get an idea of the kind of household items, tools and practices that would be interesting to elicit and record in their respective communities.
The RAs received their project laptops, and the required software was installed on them. Tim explained the RAs the ELAN-FLEx workflow and the potential scope and benefits of the application of Automatic Speech Recognition to speed up the transcription of recordings. They then practiced with the manual transcription of recordings in ELAN.
Start of the Research Assistants, August-September 2025.
The two Research Assistants of the Lo-Rig project, Sonam Lhamo and Rinchen Wangdi, officially took up their positions on August 1st, 2025. They started their work by conducting a linguistic survey of their respective speech communities, Monpa and Gongduk. This linguistic survey has already resulted in valuable data on the total number of speakers of these languages and their proficiency, the inter-generational transmission of the languages, and the reasons for the decline in the speaker populations. While the situation of Monkha was found to be more positive than expected, the Gongduk language was found to be in a more dire position than was initially assumed.
Formal commencement and set-up of the project, July-September 2025.
The Lo-Rig project officially started on the 1st of July 2025. In the subsequent months, the project was set up at Trinity College Dublin and at the CBS in Bhutan.