The Chin Languages Research Project: Community collaboration (and linguistically rare phenomena) in Indiana

The Chin Languages Research Project (CLRP) is a collaboration between speech scientists and members of Indiana’s large Burmese refugee community. Indianapolis is home to >30,000 refugees from Chin State in Western Burma. The combined language knowledge of this community, where 30 to 50 under- and un-documented Chin languages are spoken, could keep a team of linguistic researchers busy for several lifetimes. Simultaneously, community language needs are many and varied, with challenges arising regularly in both urgent (e.g., emergency room visits) and daily (e.g., buying a car) situations. As an increasing number of community members enrol at Indiana University (IU), IU linguists can conduct intensive, sustained fieldwork with under- resourced languages on or near campus, while providing targeted mentoring and imparting contextualized scientific training for an under-served group of students. In this talk we outline our efforts to pursue education, research, and service in tandem, discussing ongoing initiatives that include documentation of traditional knowledge through in-language ethnographic interviews, development of literacy materials, and NSF-funded work on health information for linguistically underserved communities.

The talk then turns to ongoing CLRP investigations of typologically rare phenomena. After brief commentary on morphosyntactic complexities (e.g. differential nominal marking systems affected by grammatical role, semantic role, and information structure), we take a more focused look at phonetic and phonological issues. In Chin languages, syllable structure simplification has yielded a synchronic situation in which individual languages are spread along a cline from more conservative (e.g., complex onsets, coda contrasts, and vowel length distinctions are retained) to more innovative (e.g. reduced onset contrasts, no retained codas, expanded vowel inventories). This creates an opportunity to investigate patterns of consonant retention and loss, as well as vowel innovation and shifts. Of special note are languages in the Maraic sub-group: they may have up to six high vowels, including the under-attested pair of vowels generally transcribed as /ɨ, ʉ/ (Arden 2010, Lotven & Berkson 2019). We discuss these and other phenomena, emphasizing the sheer volume of linguistic research that can be done right here in Indiana.