Apr 23, 2025
Tibeto-Burman Girl from Eastern India
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Tibeto-Burman Girl from Eastern India
New Article: Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand [Open Access]
When we started planning the special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in honour of Barbara F. Kelly, I immediately knew that this was the work I wanted to submit to the collection. This is a project that I had been tinkering on with my collaborators for a while, but this was the perfect venue that got me to pull it together.
This project draws together two research interests that Barb and I shared: Tibeto-Burman languages and the use of gesture. It was also great to work on this with Kristine Hildebrandt, who was Barb's close grad school friend, and Suzy Styles, who contributed an excellent illustrative figure as well as her expertise in cross-sensory representation.
Abstract
This paper examines onomatopoeia and gesture in the description of earthquakes, to better understand how people produce complex multimodal representations of experiences. We use narratives from New Zealand English speakers (2010/2011 earthquakes around Christchurch), and from Nubri and Syuba (Tibeto-Burman) speakers (2015 earthquakes in Nepal). We selected 16 narratives from each event. Between the two datasets there were distinct preferences regarding onomatopoeia; no English speakers used onomatopoeia, while seven participants across the Nepal narratives did, using distinct onomatopoeic tokens, which conformed to similar phonetic shapes. Speakers across all groups used gesture to iconically represent the earthquake, with similarities across groups regarding a preference for two hands and repetition of movement. New Zealand participants consistently used vertical gesture trajectory, while the Nepali participants used horizontal-trajectory gestures. We argue that this is likely a result of cultural context but also the interaction of housing types with the motion of an earthquake, and represents iconic information in the gestural channel that is not captured in the spoken channel. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the multimodal iconic representation of events in narrative to build an understanding of the sensory experience of an event that is shared in the retelling.
Citation
Gawne, Lauren, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, and Suzy Styles. (2025). ‘Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 45/3: 448–65. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2025.2506628
See also
AJL Special Issue: In Memory of Barbara F. Kelly (45.3)
Australian Journal of Linguistics special issue in honour of Barbara Frances Kelly (Superlinguo blog post)
Barb Kelly (Superlinguo blog post)
New research article: Reported speech in earthquake narratives from six Tibeto-Burman languages in Studies in Language
Two beautiful documentary shorts made from my Syuba archive collections (includes one short on the 2015 earthquakes)
It seems the further in higher education I get, the more we are free labor for established academics rather than students being taught directly.
I'm taking this course in field linguistics methodology and it's less a class of students learning a skill from a professor and more just two PhD students and eight undergrads learning on the job to assist a professor in his hobby project documenting a small regional Tibeto-Burman dialect of which a good friend of his is a native speaker and the world's leading expert.
q for anyone out there who knows/is learning/has learnt burmese (Myanmar language): which transliteration system do you prefer? I’ve started learning burmese in earnest in preparation for my trip in a few weeks, and ive found that the ALA-LC system is most intuitive to me (probably because I have a sanskrit background, but ALA-LC seems to be used a lot less than MLCTS. Do you see strong pros and cons with any particular transliteration systems? I have a very strong suspicion that ALA-LC isn’t used anywhere except in academia... (and really why would it lmao it is a very Indic transliteration) but if it works it works right?
New research article: Reported speech in earthquake narratives from six Tibeto-Burman languages in Studies in Language
A descriptive grammar tries to explain as many features of language as efficiently as possible. This paper, co-written with Kristine Hildebrandt, looks at all the messiness of reported speech in recordings from 6 different languages of the Tibeto-Burman family, and takes stock of some of the complexity of how people talk about what other people say and think (OA version here). There’s a lot more variation than you would expect from how reported speech in these languages is described. There’s also some phenomena that’s not described in grammars, such as reporting speech without using any grammatical or word marking (like “they said”).
The recordings used in this paper are the corpora of stories about the 2015 Nepal earthquakes that both Kristine’s team and I recorded in 2015 and 2016. It has been really fascinating to work with these corpora, and I feel a particular disappointment that an extended project I had planned to look at the way people talk about earthquakes did not get funded.
Abstract
This paper is an analysis of the use of reported speech in six Tibeto-Burman languages from two closely-related sub-branches (Tamangic and Tibetic). The data come from a set of interview narratives about people’s experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. The analysis begins with an examination of the relationship between reported speech, overt subjects and ergativity. We also look at reported speech and evidentiality, including grammatical reported speech evidentials. Structural features discussed include hybrid reported speech and multiple clause relationality. Interactional features discussed include the use of deictic shift, prominent subordination, and the multiple functions of reported speech forms, as well as zero-marked reported speech events. This analysis highlights the benefits of studying linguistic features such as reported speech in narrative context. We conclude with the implications of this usage-based analysis in the coverage of reported speech in descriptive grammars.
Citation
Gawne, Lauren, & Hildebrandt, Kristine A. 2020. Reported speech in earthquake narratives from six Tibeto-Burman languages. Studies in Language, 44(2), 461-499. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18028.gaw
Green Open Access version: 10.26181/5f0154af5ffe7
New Article Published: A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman) - and an introduction to the WikiJournal of the Humanities
This new article gives a basic overview of the grammar of the Yolmo language. I’m excited to share it, because it’s the first time I’ve systematically drawn together resources on the different dialects of the language, including those worked on by other people (Hari’s work on the Melamchi variety) and my own work on the Lamjung and Ilam varieties as well as the closely related Syuba language. I’m also excited because it’s one of the first articles in the new WikiJournal of the Humanities.
I’ve been slowly improving the Yolmo Language Wikipedia page for years, because Wikipedia is still one of the most read websites on the internet, and the place most people are likely to learn about a language. This meant that I already had the basis of a good encyclopedic article, the kind of thing you might find in The Sino-Tibetan Languages handbook or something similar (without the $420 price tag).
WikiJournals are set up as part of the larger WikiMedia family, which includes Wikipedia. There are a number of benefits to publishing an article in a WikiJournal:
It motivated me to to one final push to round out some sections of the article I’d been putting off
It creates a ‘version of record’, which can still be updated but is easier to cite because the content is stable
Because it’s a journal article, not an encyclopedia, there is more scope for speculation, and a bit of original research
It’s a peer-reviewed journal article, and so I get some academic credit for my time spent improving Wikipedia
I decided to essentially draft the document on the Wikipedia page. Once I was happy with it, I created a Wikiversity account for myself, and copied the content across to submit as a pre-print. There were a few changes to make, such as writing an abstract, and adding some more speculative thoughts about the relationship between the dialects for which there aren’t any good citable sources (yet... I’m working on it). Some lessons learnt in this process: set up your account 24-28 hours before editing, otherwise they tend to think you’re a bot. I had some trouble editing the template myself, but I’ve been told they’ve fixed that. Also, the visual editor that makes editing Wikipedia such a breeze is not turned on automatically - you have to go into your settings and in the ‘beta’ section choose the visual editor as an option.
Overall, I found the peer review experience very positive, as I was fortunate enough to have reviewers who understood the grammar overview genre, and were familiar with Wikipedia style. The whole peer review process is run on the Wikipedia model, where everything is documented publically. You can see the reviewer comments and my responses by going to the Discuss tab on the article.
Abstract
Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal. Also known as Helambu Sherpa, it is a Tibetic language. This article gives an overview of the language, including information about the dialects spoken, history of documentation, and a grammatical overview. The grammatical overview brings together work on different dialects, providing an outline of the sound system, noun phrase, verb phrase and clause structure.
Gawne, L; et al. (2019). "A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman)". WikiJournal 1(2): 2. DOI: 10.15347/wjh/2019.002
Phonemica: Recording and mapping linguistic diversity in China
We see a lot of language mapping for the USA and Europe, but Phonemica aims to provide a place to share recordings of the language varieties of China. There is a lot of linguistic diversity across China - both within the Sinitic language, which as often known as the dialects of Chinese, and also other languages.
The website allows recordings to be uploaded and then transcribed and translated. There are hundreds of recordings with geographical information.
From the ‘about’ section of the website:
Phonemica 乡音苑 is a collection of stories in local vernaculars. The stories are contributed by our users, who record, upload and transcribe regional lore: nursery rhymes and childhood games, preparation of specialty foods, humorous anecdotes, local history, and much more.
Our goal is to bring to a wider audience, through language and stories, the unique customs, beliefs and history of each village and each neighborhood, archiving the audio for future generations. We believe that each language and dialect is a priceless cultural treasure embedding history, social customs -- the knowledge of a people.
If you have a friend or relative who is a good storyteller, please register (it's free!), record their stories, and upload. You can also help by transcribing and translating stories. Again, just register, go to a recording in a dialect you understand, and click on the transcript below to transcribe. Phonemica is a community project that depends on its users and we need your help to grow!
Although it started as a platform for Chinese varieties, Phonemica is now open to non-Sinitic languages. You can hear languages from the Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai and Austronesian families well as a wide range of Sinitic languages.
Language mapping, see also:
The language of tea
Potato cake vs. potato scallop: results of the Australian words survey
Interactive map of Illustrations of the International Phonetic Association (IPA)
Yup'ik Environmental Knowledge Project - Interactive Atlas
Jackal and Pheasant picture book in Syuba, Nepali and English
This book is an illustration of a story we recorded in Syuba called “Jackal and Pheasant”, as part of the documentation of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Jolene Tan as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore lead by Joan Kelly to connect students in the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language documentation.
This small project demonstrates how digital resources can be useful for making a variety of outputs. The story was originally told in Syuba, and then translated into Nepali and English. We made versions that are only English or Syuba, and then bilingual versions in Syuba/English and Syuba/Nepali. English speakers can purchase the mono- or bi-lingual versions, while Nepali speakers can also access the story, and Syuba speakers can read a copy only in Syuba, or also in another language.
We used slightly different formatting styles for the bilingual (above) and monolingual (below) versions. Thanks to Emily Gref for formatting the final books from Jolene’s images.
Jackal and Pheasant original recording:
SUY1-140126-15
http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140126
Book archived at: http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/picturebooks
Jackal and Pheasant (Syuba only) ISBN-13 978-1545587263
Purchase print book at: http://amzn.to/2zgw88x
Digital version (free to read): https://issuu.com/ntulibraries/docs/jackal_and_pheasant
Jackal and Pheasant (English only) ISBN-13 978-1546511229
Purchase print book at: http://amzn.to/2grx7Pr
Jackal and Pheasant (Syuba/English) ISBN-13 978-1546511281
Purchase print book at: http://amzn.to/2yvHuYO
Jackal and Pheasant (Syuba/Nepali only) ISBN-13 978-1546511274
Purchase print book at: http://amzn.to/2xOrxhu