Creating and Annotating a Seke Language Corpus [skj]

FAIN: FN-271115-20

Ross Perlin
Endangered Language Alliance, Inc. (New York, NY 10011-4610)

Fieldwork to document and analyze Seke, an endangered language from the southeastern Himalayan region, through audio and video recordings of stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and histories of Seke speakers.

This project aims to build on completed fieldwork to further the documentation of Seke, an endangered and little-documented Tibeto-Burman language of the Tamangic branch, through the creation of a rich, annotated, multi-dialectal corpus of video and audio recordings including stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and stories of Seke speakers. The resulting electronic corpus and outputs will serve both community members and scholars. Seke is one of the least well-known languages of the increasingly well-documented but still relatively little-known Tamangic branch within the Tibeto-Burman language family. Without sustained documentation or virtually any multimedia record, Seke has remained a missing link in our understanding of the branch, being both geographically and typologically at the edge of the Tamangic world and completely surrounded by the Tibetic language Loke. The Seke-speaking area was once considerably larger, and a record of Seke would be significant for our understanding of the cultural, demographic, and natural history of the region. In the context of heavy language contact and outmigration, regional patterns of multilingualism encompassing Seke, Loke, Thakali, Tibetan, Nepali, and now English are shifting rapidly, also a process worthy of study. (Edited by staff)

Media Coverage

Just 700 Speak This Language (50 in the Same Brooklyn Building) (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura
Publication: New York Times
Date: 1/7/2020
Abstract: Seke, one of the world’s rarest languages, is spoken by about 100 people in New York. ... “It’s absolutely invaluable to document, analyze, understand and maintain the linguistic diversity of the planet,” said Ross Perlin, a director of the language alliance and an adjunct professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
URL: https://nyti.ms/2FtRxAc

Associated Products

Seke Language Corpus (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Seke Language Corpus
Author: Ross Perlin
Abstract: Seke is an endangered and little-documented Tibeto-Burman language of the Tamangic branch, spoken by approximately 700 people in Nepal and New York City. This is an annotated, multi-dialectal corpus of video and audio recordings including stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and stories of Seke speakers.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://kratylos.org/~kratylos/project.cgi?language=Seke&institution=ELA
Primary URL Description: Kratylos project containing full publication of FLEX database (1100 lexical entries, 23 fully analyzed texts, ~50,000 tokens, 8185 sentences)
Secondary URL: https://archive.org/details/@endangered_language_alliance?and[]=languageSorter%3A%22%5Bskj%5D+Seke+%5BNepal%5D%22
Secondary URL Description: ELA Archive.org repository containing 98 videos and 79 audio recordings, including metadata and some finalized annotations.
Access Model: Open Access

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