The Chintang language research program
छिन्ताङ भाषा अनुसन्धान कार्यक्रम
The Chintang Language Research Program aims at a rich documentation and in-depth analysis of Chintang, a language of the Kiranti subgroup of Sino-Tibetan spoken in Eastern Nepal. CLRP is the successor of an earlier project that was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Documentation of Endangered Languages Program) between 2004 and 2009 and included the development of a corpus of Chintang and one other Kiranti language, Puma (see the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project).
CLRP was started in 2009 and includes two components:
- a linguistic component devoted to analyzing grammar, lexicon and language use
- a language acquisition component devoted to analyzing how children learn the language
CLRP is carried by a team of researchers headed by Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich. The program cooperates with the Central Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Nepal and Asia Studies at Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur and is part of LiNSuN (the Linguistic Survey of Nepal) project.
The corpus contains recordings of different genres:
| Genre | Transcribed duration | Transcribed no. of words | Translated duration | Translated no. of words | Glossed duration | Glossed no. of words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| conversation | 232:44:54 | 1,064,109 | 232:39:18 | 1,045,254 | 207:23:27 | 903,645 |
| description | 3:09:10 | 20,934 | 3:06:24 | 20,617 | 1:52:56 | 14,433 |
| narrative | 6:15:13 | 46,044 | 6:12:12 | 45,826 | 5:54:52 | 42,922 |
| experimental | 4:11:31 | 43,780 | 3:57:37 | 33,273 | 2:48:08 | 24,110 |
| ritual language | 11:15:55 | 40,634 | 10:03:34 | 32,736 | 6:36:02 | 18,270 |
| songs | 00:57:27 | 3264 | 0:31:00 | 1588 | 0:21:48 | 1231 |
| total | 258:34:10 | 1,218,765 | 256:30:05 | 1,179,294 | 225:02:07 | 1,004,837 |
For detailed information about the CLRP including resources, publications and various background information, also see the 2013 Intermediate Report, available in English (here) and Nepali (here)