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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)