Biography
I was born in the Netherlands, where I followed my primary and secondary education in my hometown of Arnhem. I have a life-long fascination for the Himalayan region, and in particular Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal and the adjacent areas of Northeast India. I also have a keen interest in nature, the outdoors, and farming. From 1997 to 2002, I lived in the university town of Wageningen in the Netherlands. I completed a Master of Science at Wageningen Agricultural University, specializing in Environmental Economics, but adding a second specialization in Social Forestry. I conducted research in Bhutan, assisted by my ever-increasing network of personal and professional contacts and my fluency in several of its languages. After my graduation in 2002, I taught Business Economics to Forestry and Nature Conservation students. In 2003-2004, aided by my knowledge of the Tibetan language and culture, I worked for a nature conservation and community development program in the Mount Everest region of Tibet, China. After a year, my disillusion with the meaningfulness of the interventions of the program in this socio-politically challenged environment brought me back to the other side of the Himalayas, where I worked for the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature in Bhutan and then as a lecturer in Environmental Studies at Bhutan's only undergraduate college, Sherubtse College in Kanglung, where I taught for two years and helped to design the Double Degree program. In 2008, I returned to Wageningen, where I worked for several years in Wageningen University. In 2012, I was offered a Swiss National Science Foundation-supported PhD position at Berne University in Switzerland by my long-time mentor and inspiration, Prof. (now Em.) Dr. George van Driem. I wrote a grammar of Duhumbi, an endangered language spoken by around 600 people in the Chug valley in the western part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. I spent extended periods in Chug, learning the language in addition to describing it. I published an illustrated dictionary and a storybook, materials that will hopefully enable the Duhumbi to pass on their language to future generations. I successfully defended my dissertation in 2017 and published my grammar in 2020. In 2018, I moved to London to work at SOAS University of London on a Swiss National Science Foundation-supported postdoc to write a historical reconstruction of the hypothetical ancestor language, of Duhumbi and its seven sister languages, Proto-Western Kho-Bwa. This monograph was published by Academia Sinica in 2024. Between 2019 and 2024, I was based in London but spent extended periods in Nepal, where I worked with the independent Nepali researcher Uday Raj Aaley. We recorded the last two speakers of the unique isolate Kusunda language, Gyani Maiya and Kamala, only months before Gyani Maiya sadly passed away. Supported by the British Academy and several other donors, we have been working to transcribe, translate, and analyse those recordings, publish materials to revitalize the language, materials on the history and current situation of the Kusunda people and their language, and materials on the process of and limitations to revitalizing the language. In addition, Uday has been teaching Kusunda to children and adults again. We are also working to find out more about the Kusunda's position in the population and linguistic history of Asia. In 2024, I was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant to document and describe the endangered Gongduk and Mönpa languages of Bhutan and in particular their unique biactantial verbal agreement systems. The Lo-Rig project will also apply and further develop Automatic Speech Recognition for low-resource languages and produce materials for the revitalization of these two languages. The project is hosted at Trinity College Dublin, where I have been appointed as Associate Professor in Asian Studies.
Publications and Further Research Outputs
- Wu, Mei-Shin; Schweikhard, Nathanael E.; Bodt, Timotheus A.; Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the Art, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 6, (2), 2020, p1-14Journal Article, 2020, DOI , TARA - Full Text
Research Expertise
My main research interests are in language documentation and description, especially of smaller, lesser-known and endangered linguistic varieties, and in the linguistic reconstruction of their ancestral languages and linguistic histories. I have a background in environmental and agricultural economics, social forestry, and nature conservation. This background enables me to easily engage with rural communities on topics that matter to them, such as agriculture and livestock, rural development, sustainable use of forest and other natural resources, nature conservation and the human-wildlife conflict, and the impact of human activities, including climate change, on rural lives and livelihoods. My linguistic background and proficiency in several languages further facilitate such conversations. I also have a keen interest in human history, including migration and contact. My geographical focus is on the Himalayan region, and in particular the countries of Bhutan, Nepal, and the regions of Tibet (China) and Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh (India). Because of my maternal ancestry, I also have a keen interest in the languages and cultures of the Indonesian archipelago.
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TitleLo-RigSummaryGongduk and Mönpa 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 Mönpa are also at a high risk of extinction. Therefore, it is of absolute necessity that we 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 Mönpa 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.Funding AgencyEuropean Research CouncilDate From01 June 2025Date To31 May 2030
Language studies, Linguistics, Indigenous Politics, Other languages and literature, Agroforestry, Linguistic anthropology, Agricultural economics, Rural sociology, Cultural Studies, Rural community development, Other history, heritage and archaeology, Ethnography, Environment and resource economics,
Recognition
- Associate Editor, Himalayan Linguistics