Danielle Ronkos (Datapeople) & Zach Wellstood (UC Berkeley)

The Making of the Sikles Language Portal

Tamu Kyuii

• Name of an ethnic group and the language they speak, known more widely as Gurung
• Tamu is the Gurung autonym, kyuii means 'language'
• Minority language of Nepal
• Not related to Indo-Aryan languages like Nepali, official language of Nepal
• Classified as Tibeto-Burman
• Closely related to other Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal like Tamang, Manage, Nar Phu Thakali, Seke, Chantyal (DeLancey 2003, Noonan 2008)
• Gurungs traditionally live in small communities in the foothills of the Himalayas
• This project focuses on the variety of Gurung spoken in Sikles Village (Tsili nããsa)

Gurung-Speaking Districts of Nepal

• Exact number of Gurung speakers unknown
• In Nepal may be as many as 325,000 speakers (Glover & Landon 1975, Government of Nepal 2011, Hildebrandt 2004, Noonan 2008)
• Also many Gurung communities abroad in India and Pakistan, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, parts of Europe, and parts of the U.S. including New York City
• Diaspora greatly shaped by treaty at end of Anglo-Nepalese war in 1816, which formed the Gurkha regiments (Caplan 1991, Pignède 1993)
• Many retired Gurung soldiers and their families settled in Pokhara, Nepal’s second-largest city

(Wikimedia Commons)

Tsili Nããsa

• Also called Sikles (sometimes spelled Siklis)
• About 4 hours north of Pokhara (if the road is good) in the foothills of the Himalayas inside the Annapurna Conservation Area
• Elevation of ~6,500 ft
• Community of several thousand families with close ties to Pokhara and the village across the valley, Tangting (Tõhdi)

Sikles Gurung Documentation Project

• Started in 2013 by Peter Graif at the Endangered Language Alliance in NYC; we both joined in 2014
• Working with 1 speaker of Sikles Gurung who had been living in the U.S. with his family
• Several field trips to Nepal to work with other Sikles Gurung speakers (2016, 2017, 2018)
• First challenge was figuring out sound system, which became Danielle's dissertation (Ronkos 2020)
• Phonetics and phonology differ from other documented varieties
• Significant not only for transcription, but also for developing an orthography

Sikles Gurung Language Materials

• Elicitation sessions at the ELA: ~29 hours of processed data
• Conducted in English in a variety of environments using a variety of recording devices
• Some morphosyntax
• Some phonology (lots of time spent on finding minimal pairs)
• Some wordlist and dictionary elicitation (with Glover et. al’s (1977) dictionary of Ghachok Gurung)
• Several longer narratives, some with accompanying video
• Elicitation sessions in Sikles
• Recorded with Zoom H4N recorder, sometimes also with Sennheiser ME66 microphone
• Some short narratives or conversational data collected
• Data on Sikles Language Portal primarily from wordlists recorded with 5 (6) speakers
• Wordlist 1: 87 nouns, adjectives - all speakers
• Wordlist 2: 35 verbs - 3 speakers
• Wordlist 3: 97 nouns, adjectives, numerals - 2 speakers

Conceptualizing the Sikles Language Portal

• Give Sikles community access to language data and recordings we collected
• As speakers of minority languages urbanize in Nepal, they tend to shift to Nepali
• Our consultant repeatedly expressed a desire for pedagogical materials
• Target audiences:
• Gurung people in the diaspora who speak Nepali but did not learn Gurung
• Gurung people in the diaspora who speak English but did not learn Gurung
• Tourists from Nepal who are not Gurung and speak Nepali
• Tourists from abroad who do not speak Gurung or Nepali (e.g. trekkers)
• Basic vocabulary that would be useful for visitors to Sikles

Sikles Language Portal

• Decided to create site using existing materials (no more elicitation)
• Prioritized words for which audio recordings exist
• Eventually hope to include all existing materials in Portal
• Portal currently focuses on Wordlist 1
• More voices available; includes basic, essential vocabulary from Swadesh list
• Inspired in part by:
• Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Portal (https://pmportal.org/)
• Northern Paiute Language Project (https://paiute.ucsc.edu/)
• Yurok Language Project (http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~yurok/index.php)
• Ararahih'urípih, Karuk Dictionary & Corpus (http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~karuk/index.php)
• Preservation of the Vlaški and Žejanski Language (https://www.vlaski-zejanski.com/en/)
• N!aq Spelling Primer (not currently available)
• ...and Duolingo!

Design Considerations

Orthography

• No official orthography for Gurung
• Several proposals (Roman alphabet & Devanagari) but none widely adopted by community
• Often for varieties spoken in other villages:
• Ghachok Gurung (Glover et al. 1977)
• Manang Gurung (Tamu, N.D.)
• Novel script proposed by Tamu (Gurung) Language-Script and Cultural Development Foundation Nepal in 2010 for Unicode
• Gurung speakers do write Gurung on social media
• Many conventions, abbreviations of internet Nepali i.e. <x> used for छ
• All Gurung speakers we have interacted with also speak Nepali, Nepali medium of instruction in Sikles schools
• To make the Portal we needed a way to write Gurung that fit Sikles phonology
• 2 preliminary orthographies: 1 using Roman alphabet, 1 using Nepali Devanagari
• Based on orthography developed with Gurung speaker in 2014
• Some obstacles to both orthographies (feel free to ask in the Q&A!)

Database Design

FLEx

SFM

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MySQL

(via PHP)

Headwords, theme, variants, examples, filenames for example sound files, image filenames, etc.

Export FLEx to SFM, copy SFM and paste into SLP backend. Website is tailored to recognize certain SFM tags.

Automatically convert SFM to MySQL database, link filenames to files (uploaded separately).

UI Design

• Mobile-first design (eventually available offline via cache)

• Primarily organized by theme, not by alphabet
• Two orthographies and three languages makes alphabetization difficult
• Allows users to learn semantically related words and sentences together
• Makes finding words somewhat difficult
• Search function and Complete Dictionary page (+CtrlF) help remedy this
• How to thematify non-nominal headwords (now, here etc.)?

UI Design

• Recordings of speaker NG are always first if available
• Consistency throughout the portal
• NG's recordings are most common
• All other (5) speakers included when available (alphabetically ordered by initials)
• Sikles is small, so vocal anonymity cannot be ensured
• We try to preserve as much interspeaker variation as possible
• In forms with consonant syncope, we choose the non-syncopated form as the headword and list the short form as a variant (e.g. nagi vs. nai)
• In forms with phrasal variants, we choose the non-phrasal one as a headword and list phrasal variant(s) as variants (e.g. ghrobu vs. myu ghrobu)
• SLP allows only 1 variant currently, so others are placed into examples
• Syntax highlighter feature adds an educational component
• Also multiplies the number of learnable words beyond just headwords

Goals for the Future

• Currently in alpha-testing phase (awaiting feedback from Gurung consultant and others)
• Some goals for the future:
• Adding photos for entries, potentially videos
• Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, CC Licensing
• Adding the rest of our lexical data to populate other themes
• Caching the site for offline availability on mobile phones
• Localizing the interface completely in all three languages
• Incorporating texts
• Interactive component with community-sourced content, like a Facebook wall of pictures and sentences for each headword
• Instruction manual for how to convert from FLEx > SFM, etc.

References

Caplan, L. (1991). 'Bravest of the Brave': Representations of 'the Gurkha' in British Military Writings. Modern Asian � Studies, 25(3), 571-597.

DeLancey, S. (2003). Classical Tibetan. The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 3, 255.

Garrett, Andrew. (2018). Online Dictionaries for Language Revitalization. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (eds.), The � routledge handbook of language revitalization. Abingdon: Routledge.

Glover, W. W., Glover, J. R. & Gurung, D.B. (1977). Gurung-Nepali-English dictionary, with English-Gurung and � Nepali-Gurung indexes, Pacific Linguistics, Series C, 51. Canberra: Australian National University.

Government of Nepal National Planning Commission Secretariat, Central Bureau of Statistics (2011). National Population � and Housing Census.

Noonan, M. (2008). Contact-induced change. Language contact and Contact languages, 7, 81.

Pignède, B. (1993). The Gurungs: A Himalayan Population of Nepal. Ratna Pustak Bhandar.

Ronkos, D. (2020). The Sounds of Sikles Gurung: A Phonetic and Phonological Description of a Tibeto-Burman Language � of Nepal. Doctoral Dissertation: The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Tamu, D. डिल्लीजङ तमु (N.D.). तमु क्योए Tamu Kyoe: Nepali-Tamu (Gurung)-English Dictionary.

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Appendix: Orthography

• Major obstacles for Roman alphabet orthography:
• Long vowels: <a> vs. <aa> for /ʌ/ and /aː/
• Nasal vowels : <ãã> for /ãː/
• Breathy register: <aah> or <haa> for /a̤ː/
• Aspirated obstruents: <t> vs. <th> for /t/ and /tʰ/
• Retroflex stops: <ṭ> and <ḍ> for /ʈ/ and /ɖ/
• Affricates: <ts> and <dz> for /ʦ/ and /ʣ/
• Lateral fricative: <hl> for /ɬ/�
• Major obstacles for Devanagari orthography:
• Some long vowels: short ए /e/, but in Nepali long ऐ is diphthong /ʌi/, so /eː/ is एए
• Breathy register: हा for /a̤ː/ or भ, ध, घ for /bV̤/, /dV̤/, /gV̤/
• Consonant clusters: ल्ह for /ɬ/, ङ्ह for /ŋV̤/, ब्ल्ह for /blV̤/
• Lateral fricative: ह्ल for /ɬ/ but ल्ह for /lV̤/