Indianapolis is home to >20,000 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. Communication challenges regularly arise in both urgent (e.g., emergency room visits) and daily (e.g., buying a car) situations. An increasing number of students from the community are enrolled at Indiana University (IU). This confluence of factors means that 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. Our students serve as a bridge between the university and the community, and co-determine new research and service directions. These opportunities led us to create the Chin Languages Research Project (CLRP, chinlanguages.org), through which we pursue education, research, and service in tandem. We present an overview of our work, review linguistic points of interest, and highlight open questions.
Current work is with Hakha Lai (also known as Laiholh or Hakha Chin), Lutuv (also known as Lautu), and Zophei. Hakha Lai is a lingua franca both in Chin State and in Indiana, where it is spoken by perhaps 10,000 people. Zophei is spoken by 20,000 people worldwide (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig 2019), including 4,000 people in Indiana. Lutuv, with 15,000 speakers worldwide (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig 2019), is spoken by perhaps 600 people in Indiana. While there is some existing work on Lai, Zophei and Lutuv are to the best of our knowledge undescribed apart from CLRP work. Many basic questions about both the languages themselves and the linguistic situation on the ground remain open. We know that many languages are being spoken, but we cannot make a more precise guess than 30-50 and we don’t know how many people are speaking each language. We know that the degree of multi-lingualism is high—our students’ parents regularly speak five to eight languages each—and we suspect that the degree of multilingualism is decreasing (but not disappearing) in the younger generations. We do not know, however, which languages children are acquiring. We touch on a number of these topics, sharing results from existing work and enumerating some future directions.
Structurally, Chin languages exhibit a number of typologically rare phenomena. The CLRP has undertaken projects on features ranging from internally-headed relative clauses (Flego 2019) to multiple determination (Wamsley 2019; Matthews and Wamsley 2020) to sound change (Lotven 2020). In the realm of phonetics, there is rich ground for investigation. Chin languages often have dense segmental inventories that include laterally-released obstruents (/tl, tlh/) and non-modal sonorants (voiceless in onset position and glottalized in coda position) (Berkson 2019, Lotven et al. 2020, Van Bik 2009). Hakha Lai contrasts dental and alveolar obstruents (/t̪ t̪h d̪ t th/) (Maddieson & Van Bik 2004, Peterson 2017). Lutuv and Zophei contain up to six high vowels, including the under-attested pair of high central vowels /ɨ, ʉ/ (Arden 2010, Lotven & Berkson 2019). Syllable structure simplification has yielded a synchronic situation in which individual languages are spread along a cline from more conservative (e.g., complex onsets and vowel length distinctions are retained) to more innovative (e.g. reduced onset contrasts, no retained codas), creating the opportunity to investigate patterns of consonant retention and loss as well as vowel shifts. Lexical and grammatical tone are abundant, and largely undescribed. We conclude the talk by discussing ways in which we are moving beyond the lab in order to explore, document, and analyze phonetic phenomena in Central Indiana.
Kelly Berkson is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.
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