Weijian Meng

Weijian Meng, Dr.

Postdoctoral Researcher, NCCR

Language, ACQuisition, DIVersity Lab

Distributional Linguistics Lab

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I come from a typologically-minded, field-dwelling, descriptivist background, studying small languages in some of the most picturesque places in (Greater) Mainland Southeast Asia. My PhD was a grammar of Saek (Kra-Dai), based on video recordings of people's chats collected during nine months of my life in the isolated Nam Noi valley of Laos, without sharing a language with them to begin with. I have also worked with diaspora Hmong (Hmong-Mien) communities in Australia and northern Laos, and Moklen (Austronesian) communities in southern Thailand.

My research is currently expanding towards more controlled methodologies. As a member of the Gurung (Tibeto-Burman) language-acquisition team, I will build a longitudinal, multimodal corpus and run experiments in beautiful mountain villages of Nepal with my colleagues.

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