NTU Language Documentation Lab

Welcome to the NTU LangDoc Lab!

The NTU Language Documentation Lab is committed to the description and documentation of understudied and endangered languages across Southeast Asia and extending into South Asia and China through the collection and analysis of data from native speakers. Some of the areas where we have done fieldwork include:

Alexander Coupe analyzes and documents the languages of Southeast and South Asia, with a specific focus on the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India. He has published extensively on the Ao language and is the author of A grammar of Mongsen Ao (2007) and A phonetic and phonological description of Ao (2003). He was the editor of a special issue on nominalization (Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, Vol. 31.2, 2008), and co-editor of Studies in transitivity: Insights from language documentation (Studies in Language 35.3, 2011) . His current research is on Khiamniungan, Sangtam and Yimkhiungrü, three under-documented languages of east-central Nagaland. PDFs of many of his papers and books can be downloaded from his Academia.edu page.

Hiram’s PhD at NTU involved writing a comprehensive grammatical description of Pnar, a language of the Khasian branch located in Meghalaya state of North-East India. The data underpinning his analysis is available in NTU’s DataVerse (https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/KVFGBZ) and the thesis (“A grammar of Pnar”) is available for download in the NTU repository as well as on his Academia.edu page. As one of the four major Khasian varieties, Pnar differs from the well-described Standard Khasi variety, exhibiting verb-initial order, gender distinctions in 2nd person pronouns, productive nominalization via gender clitics, and a semantic role marking system. A comprehensive documentation and description for other Khasian varieties is underway in order to further investigate the historical development of the Khasian branch.

František Kratochvíl analyzes and documents the languages spoken in Alor, Indonesia with a special focus on Abui. He has published several language resources for Abui, including grammars, dictionaries and story books for children.

Jian Han wrote a sketch grammar of Suboo, also spoken on Alor for his Bachelor's thesis in 2015.

After completing his MA studies in Stockholm, Bruno joined the LMS Division, at NTU, as a PhD student in 2013, and embarked on fieldwork on Coastal Marind, a language of Southern New Guinea. The eminent fieldworker Petrus Drabbe once described Marind as "the most complicated of all known Papuan languages", and the complexities of the language are now made available for a wider audience through Bruno's thesis, which is a typologically informed grammar of Coastal Marind based on modern language documentation techniques.

Hannah Choi wrote a sketch grammar of Riantana, spoken in and around Kimaam Island for her Bachelor's thesis in 2015.

Closer to home, many of our undergraduate students work on languages spoken in Singapore and its surrounding areas. See more of what our students have done here.