Exploring the crossroads of linguistic diversity: language contact in Southeast Asia

The complex linguistic diversity and endemic multilingualism represented in the cohabitating ethnolinguistic populations of Southeast Asia remain poorly understood. Until now, the phenomenon of language contact – whereby the languages of closely interacting communities influence each other’s grammatical structures and vocabularies – has not been systematically studied in this region. This ground-breaking project will address significant gaps in our knowledge by documenting four endangered languages while simultaneously exploring four language contact situations in Southeast Asia. The work will produce empirically-based predictive model of language contact that will inform linguistic theory and guide future research in the field, and the grammatical descriptions will preserve the languages for the communities that speak them and research scholars alike.