The goal of this project is to create a database of comparable lexical items in a number of representative South Asian languages, with a focus on the Himalayan region in India and to use this database for investigating the Himalayas as a linguistic area.

The project is a collaboration with the IDS project (MPI Leipzig, Germany), an international initiative for collecting comparable basic vocabulary in a large number of languages, where the database can be used for various different purposes. The database will enable the project to investigate questions relating to South Asia and the Himalayan region as linguistic macro- and micro-areas.

The results of this project will contribute to methodological development in digital documentation and linguistic typology research. It will add South Asian languages to the IDS. It will also contribute to our knowledge of the languages of this region, of the Himalayas as a linguistic area, and of areal-typological linguistics in general.

The project is financially supported by the Swedish Research Council for the three-year period 2010-2012 (VR dnr 2009-1448).

Project participants

• Lars Borin, Språkbanken
• Anju Saxena, Uppsala University
• Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
• Taraka Rama, Språkbanken