Research project Gawarbati: Documenting a vulnerable linguistic community in the Hindu Kush
In this project, we document Gawarbati, the little documented language of a vulnerable community in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The aim is to compile an annotated audio and video corpus and a lexical database, to serve as a lasting record.
Gawarbati is one of a number of lesser documented communities in the Hindu Kush region in High Asia. There is no comprehensive study of its grammar or lexicon, and no available corpus reflecting a unique mountain culture. A better understanding of this conservative, yet in some respects innovative, Indo-European language is a key to untangling classification issues, settlement history and contact patterns in this diverse region and beyond. The remaining speakers live in a cluster of villages on both sides of the border. Regionally dominant Pashto has gradually encroached on the Gawarbati area and is at the receiving end of an irreversible language shift. The aim of this urgent project is to collect, annotate and analyze language data, both for long-term preservation and for producing a modern grammatical description. It is undertaken in close collaboration with the local community and under the auspices of a regional language resource centre.
Project description
The Gawarbati community resides in a sensitive border region, largely inaccessibility for traditional on-site fieldwork by outsider researchers. Most actual data collection and basic annotation is carried out by a Pakistan-based team, consisting of Fazal Hadi, a local research team coordinator, and the three mother-tongue language consultants Abdullah Soan, Nasirullah Nasir and Fazal Akbar. These trained community members carry out interviews with other community members, make relevant video and audio recordings and enter lexical data and relevant metadata. The language consultants also provide a first transcription and translation of the recordings. The regional language resource centre Forum for Language Initiatives, based in Islamabad, plays a key role in this highly collaborative project. While the primary research outputs are digital and open-access, print products (or any other form considered useful by the language users) will be provided locally to serve as practical community resources in ongoing educational efforts and in the development of a growing body of local literature and media products.
Project members
Project managers
Henrik Liljegren
Professor
Members
Anastasiia Panova
PhD student
