Chintang/Puma

Project structure and main goals

Our core objective was to provide comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the languages paired with rich linguistic and ethnographic annotations. The project was divided into three groups with different responsibilities:

Linguistics – Balthasar Bickel, Novel Kishor Rai, Vishnu Singh Rai
Ethnography – Martin Gaenszle, Judith Pettigrew
Language acquisition – Sabine Stoll, Elena Lieven

The general coordinator and grant administrator was Balthasar Bickel. Linguistics and ethnography were studied in both the Chintang and Puma field sites. Language acquisition was only studied for Chintang.

The project was administered by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Leipzig and was a member of the Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LINSUN) initiative, which was launched in 2002 by the Department of Linguistcs at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. The linguistics departments of the two universities cooperated systematically on the base of a Memorandum of Understanding.
Cooperations were also set up with the Center of Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) at Tribhuvan University, where the project offices were located, and with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

The diagram below shows the cooperations of CPDP.
Formal cooperation structure of CPDP

TU – Tribhuvan University, Department of Linguistics

LINSUN – Linguistic Survey of Nepal

CNAS – Center of Nepal and Asian Studies

U. Leipzig – University of Leipzig, Department of Linguistics

MPI – Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

DOBES – Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen (Documentation of Endangered Languages)

VW – Volkswagen-Stiftung (Volkswagen Foundation)