Research profile
I am interested in language documentation and contact, focusing on lesser-known languages of Assam, particularly within the Tibeto-Burman family. For my PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, I worked on two languages spoken in Assam’s Barak Valley, Saihriem (South-Central) and Jhilo-Milo (Indo-Aryan), examining how socio-demographic environments influence, or sometimes resist, language change.
Currently, I am working as a Principal Project Scientist at the Speech Lab, IIT Delhi, leading the documentation of Saihriem under a Major Documentation Grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. This collaborative project, between IIT Delhi, University of Bern, and Assam University, documents Saihriem, an endangered South-Central Trans-Himalayan language spoken by about 600–700 people in Cachar district, Assam. Our goal is to build an extensive audio-visual corpus of Saihriem, covering diverse genres of everyday and cultural practices, while also developing a multilingual lexical database and compiling sociolinguistic profiles of the community. The documentation prioritizes collaborative methods, community participation, and capacity building, ensuring that the work strengthens both linguistic knowledge and local cultural resilience.
