Gurung Language Research Program

The Gurung Language Research Program is a comprehensive project dedicated to documenting and analyzing the Gurung (Tamu) language, focusing on first language acquisition and spontaneous conversations in the understudied Syangja variety. Through naturalistic corpora, interaction games, and psycholinguistic field experiments, the project explores how Gurung speakers use language in real-time communication and how social cognition shapes comprehension and production. The corpora provide both an empirical foundation for studying Gurung and a lasting record of its language and culture. Interaction games examine multimodal communication in social coordination, including turn-taking, repair, and common ground management. Psycholinguistic experiments test hypotheses on comprehension, production, and acquisition, leveraging Gurung’s unique pragmatic features, such as optional ergativity and converb constructions. This community-driven research ensures close collaboration with community members in language documentation and research.

• Contact: Weijian Meng
• Team: Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel, Dagmar Jung, Weijian Meng, Sofya Ganieva
• Local Partner: Lekhnath S. Pathak