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 01 August 2025.

They started their work by conducting a linguistic survey of their respective speech communities, Monkha 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.