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Article published In:
Documentary Linguistics: Working with Communities
Edited by Sumittra Suraratdecha and Toshihide Nakayama
[Language Ecology 3:2] 2019
► pp. 189–208

Sociolinguistic survey of Nepalese languages

A critical evaluation

| Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu , Nepal

This paper presents a close inspection of the research conducted with a sociolinguistic survey of Nepalese languages developed by Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LiNSuN) Project (2008–2018). The paper provides an overview of the linguistic situation of Nepal with brief outlines of various linguistic surveys in different times. It also examines the various sociolinguistic surveys (SLS) and their implications. Through a reflection of my personal engagement in various activities of the surveys, e.g. Kaike (Regmi 2012), Bhojpuri and Awadhi (Thakur and Regmi 2013), Khadiya (Dahal and Yadava 2014), Gangai (Gautam and Thakur 2014) and Thulung (Gautam and Sapkota 2014), Aathpahariya (Regmi 2015) and Tharu (Yadav 2015), Limbu (Gautam and Thakur 2016), and Dhuleli (Prasai and Regmi 2017) and Lohwa (Gautam 2017), and quantitative information available in the literature, it is concluded that previous surveys have mainly focused on sociolinguistic features and have disregarded the ethnolinguistic characteristics.

Keywords: pilot survey, Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LiNSuN), ethnolinguistic, multilingualism, sociolinguistic features
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Writing systems
    • 1.2The legal status of Nepalese languages
  • 2.Linguistic surveys in Nepal: An overview
  • 3.Sociolinguistic Survey of Nepalese languages (2008–2018)
    • 3.1Sociolinguistic questionnaires
    • 3.2Recorded text testing (RTT)
    • 3.3Sentence repetition test (SRT)
    • 3.4Participatory method (PM)
    • 3.5Lexical similarity (210-word list)
  • 4.SLS progress activities
    • 4.1Pilot survey (2008)
    • 4.2SLS management and administration
    • 4.3SLS progress report
  • 5.Case studies in SLS
    • 5.1Upper hill languages
    • 5.2Rai Kiranti languages
    • 5.3Language spoken in Terai
    • 5.4Cross-border languages
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Geographical factors
    • 6.2Sociocultural factors
    • 6.3Language contact and multilingualism
    • 6.4SLS nature and tools
    • 6.5Ethnolinguistic observations
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 9 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/le.19004.gau
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