Overview
About Lo-Rig
The five-year project Lo-Rig: Biactantial agreement in the endangered Gongduk and Monkha languages of Bhutan is based at Trinity's School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences (SLSCS).
The Lo-Rig project uses elicited and natural speech data from two of Bhutan's unique languages, Gongduk and Monkha, to produce exhaustive descriptive grammars.
Gongduk and Monkha 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. They are also at high risk of extinction. It is therefore of absolute necessity to document these languages comprehensively, based on natural speech corpora, before they disappear.
When a people lose mastery of their mother tongue, they often suffer a loss of identity, followed by emotional, mental, and social challenges. Recognising that linguistic description can provide communities with materials to promote their linguistic heritage, 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 research. The exhaustive description of Gongduk and Monkha will allow comparison with other Sino-Tibetan languages and contribute to understanding the origin and development of verbal agreement in the language family.
Bhutan's unique cultural and linguistic heritage is a cornerstone of its national identity and development philosophy. Technological advances present both risks and opportunities for safeguarding this heritage. The Lo-Rig project applies and develops innovative methods to speed up and simplify transcription and analysis, using technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition. The project also trains Bhutanese linguists, contributing to a more sustainable future for Bhutan's languages and producing outputs for language promotion.