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:

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)