New Insights from Kiranti for Sino-Tibetan Historical Linguistics: Documentation, Reconstruction, Classification

Objective

Kiranti is a group of ca. 30 small and critically endangered languages spoken in eastern Nepal. Because of their distinct morphological profile, they have a paramount potential to shed new light on the history and diachronic dynamics of the Sino-Tibetan language family to which they belong. To date, however, this potential is untapped: Kiranti has so far not been included in reconstructions of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and the position of Kiranti within the Sino-Tibetan family tree and the exact extent of the group remain unclear. Additionally, some Kiranti languages are still essentially undocumented. NeKST (New Insights from Kiranti for Sino-Tibetan Historical Linguistics: Documentation, Reconstruction, Classification) tackles these deficits with three interconnected research objectives: 1) document two under-researched Kiranti languages by conducting fieldwork in Nepal, 2) craft a new reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, based on a comparison of Kiranti with the three major literary languages of Sino-Tibetan, Tibetan, Burmese and Chinese, 3) advance our understanding of the classification of Kiranti by establishing and testing a set of new candidates for shared innovations. NeKST is hosted by the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies of Trinity College Dublin and supervised by Prof. Nathan W. Hill, one of the leading scholars on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. NeKST will bring together methods of historical linguistics, philology and language documentation to advance our understanding of Kiranti, but also of the important Sino-Tibetan family in general, and to make an empirical contribution to the methodological controversies surrounding the reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Importantly, the dissemination and communication activities of NeKST are hoped to create awareness for the endangerment situation of the Kiranti languages and the ethnolinguistic diversity of Nepal, and to have a positive effect on the self-esteem of the Kiranti themselves.