When we started planning the special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in honour of Barbara F. Kelly, I immediately knew that this was the work I wanted to submit to the collection. This is a project that I had been tinkering on with my collaborators for a while, but this was the perfect venue that got me to pull it together.
This project draws together two research interests that Barb and I shared: Tibeto-Burman languages and the use of gesture. It was also great to work on this with Kristine Hildebrandt, who was Barb’s close grad school friend, and Suzy Styles, who contributed an excellent illustrative figure as well as her expertise in cross-sensory representation.
Abstract
This paper examines onomatopoeia and gesture in the description of earthquakes, to better understand how people produce complex multimodal representations of experiences. We use narratives from New Zealand English speakers (2010/2011 earthquakes around Christchurch), and from Nubri and Syuba (Tibeto-Burman) speakers (2015 earthquakes in Nepal). We selected 16 narratives from each event. Between the two datasets there were distinct preferences regarding onomatopoeia; no English speakers used onomatopoeia, while seven participants across the Nepal narratives did, using distinct onomatopoeic tokens, which conformed to similar phonetic shapes. Speakers across all groups used gesture to iconically represent the earthquake, with similarities across groups regarding a preference for two hands and repetition of movement. New Zealand participants consistently used vertical gesture trajectory, while the Nepali participants used horizontal-trajectory gestures. We argue that this is likely a result of cultural context but also the interaction of housing types with the motion of an earthquake, and represents iconic information in the gestural channel that is not captured in the spoken channel. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the multimodal iconic representation of events in narrative to build an understanding of the sensory experience of an event that is shared in the retelling.
Citation
Gawne, Lauren, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, and Suzy Styles. (2025). ‘Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 45/3: 448–65. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2025.2506628
This article looks at songs sung by Syuba speakers to understand how they see themselves, their community and their language. This work draws on the songs in the corpus of Syuba that I’ve been working on since 2014, and other collections of songs put together by Syuba speakers.
One of the nice things about working with songs is that people make deliberate choices about the stories they want to tell in these songs. By looking at a combination of original compositions, folk songs and religious songs we see that people represent a complex identity that is Syuba and also Yolmo, Tibetan and Nepali. We look at how these identities intersect with people’s understanding of local and larger geographies, and the changes that occur with development.
This article is a collaboration with two colleagues: Gerald Roche, an anthropologist with interests in multilingualism and the relationship between language and identity in Tibetan communities, and Ruth Gamble, a historian with expertise in Tibetan poetry and the environment.
It was so nice to spend so much time listening to the songs performed by Syuba speakers, and thinking about the stories that they share. In many ways this paper is the local context to the larger political reality described in my recent paper about International Relations in the Himalaya with this team and Alex Davis.
Abstract
This paper draws on song texts from two corpora of Syuba, a Southern
Tibetic language of Nepal. The songs have rich, interlinking themes
relevant to language, identity and the situated context of Syuba people.
We draw upon the texts to illustrate themes of identity, relationship,
language, development and space. This analysis is grounded in an
interdisciplinary approach bringing together linguistic, anthropological
and historical perspectives. Through these themes, we come to a nuanced
account of a minority language group, who see themselves as Syuba,
Yolmo, Tibetan and Nepali, and how these multiple identities co-exist.
Citation
Gawne, L., G. Roche & R. Gamble. “The bus doesn’t stop for us”: Multilingualism, attitudes and identity in songs of a Tibetic community of Nepal. Multilingua. 1-31. doi: 10.1515/multi-2020-0026
This new publication is quite different to any other academic article I’ve been an author on to date. In this article we bring together perspectives from IR & politics (Alex Davis), environmental history (Ruth Gamble), anthropology (Gerald Roche) and linguistics (me!) to argue for the importance of understanding the Himalaya as a complex human and ecological environment in its own right, rather than as a nation-state border zone of conflict.
This article started as long discussions over lunch. It then became a series of short articles in different venues. Then Alex managed to wrangle us and the whole argument into this journal article. It’s a wonderful example of the importance of discussion across disciplines, and the value of conversations over lunch.
Thawing tensions in the Himalaya - an article by all four of us that is a shorter version of the argument we put forward in the AJIA article
Abstract
This article examines international relations (IR)’s approach to the
Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over
contested international borders is not the region’s primary
international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by
state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical
tensions, threaten the region’s ecologies, cultures and languages. The
Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic
groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed
most of Asia’s large rivers. In recent years, India and China have
pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling
greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats
are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at
twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and
droughts. However, the region’s complexity is not matched by IR’s
theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent
conflict between state actors. We argue that IR’s analysis of the region
must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred
approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its
geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished
through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through
focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political
authority and the region’s environment.
Reference
Davis, A. E., Gamble, R., Roche, G., & Gawne, L. (2020).
International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies, cultures
and geopolitics. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2020.1787333 [Open Access article]
Linguistic diversity in focus – interview with Lauren Gawne
Before I went on maternity leave I spent the last half of 2018 putting together a podcast series for La Trobe, interviewing researchers from the Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area. I also got to do an interview. It was great to get to chat about linguistic diversity and the importance of linguistic communication
From the episode summary:
We don’t often think about the gestures that we use when we talk,
although you might after listening to this episode. Gestures are a part
of language, and like many other areas of language, linguistics provides
a way to better understand them, and ourselves. Lauren Gawne is a David
Myers Research Fellow in Linguistics, whose research focuses on grammar
and gesture in Tibeto-Burman languages. In this episode of Research in
Focus, Lauren chats to Lawrie Zion about why we gesture, the need to
study a diverse range of languages, and the importance of communicating
research. For more on Lauren’s research: scholars.latrobe.edu.au/display/l2gawne
The Himalayas are a global center for linguistic diversity. Setting out from Beijing or Delhi, the number of languages rises with altitude, conforming to global patterns that see linguistic diversity increasing in rough, mountainous terrain. This diversity is not neatly patterned: state, ethnicity, and language are not correlated. Knowing where someone lives or what identity they profess does not tell us what languages they speak.
The Geopolitics of Language in the Himalayas, Gerald Roche and Lauren Gawne
One of the things I love about working in the Himalaya, or really anywhere in the world when you start looking at linguistic diversity, is that the neat lines we think of as nations and languages rarely hold up.
Along with my La Trobe colleague Gerald Roche I wrote this introductory explainer for The Diplomat about the linguistic reality and political tensions in the Himalaya. We’ve also collaborated with Alex Davis and Ruth Gamble for The Interpreter on a piece that also looks at the environmental context that this all occurs in.
It’s been a really interesting opportunity to write about language and the linguistic context for websites that have politics and IR focus. And I get to do so while working with excellent colleagues!
A popular expression in Nepal is a fatalistically resigned ke garne? ‘what to do?’ The government office is closed, ke garne? The bus is running late, ke garne? When people say this, they also bring their palms up and rotate them inwards, with their thumb and index finger extended and the other fingers bunched in.
This gesture doesn’t just occur with this phrase, it turns up in all kinds of question-asking contexts, across the wider region of India-Nepal-Pakistan and beyond. This has been noted anecdotally before, and in this new paper for the journal Gesture, I look at the gesture and its use in detail for the first time. I’m very excited about this publication because it’s my first publication on gesture in Syuba, and my first publication in Gesture (if the name alone doesn’t give it away, it’s the journal in this field!).
(GIF from SUY-141022-03, Sangbu Syuba gesturing while he says ‘what do we say?’)
The data are archived with Paradisec, and I made the clips specifically with the rotated palms tokens available through FigShare.
You can view the abstract on the journal website, and download the full text if you have institutional access. If you don’t, but you’d like to read the article, you can contact me for a pre-publication copy.
I’m also very excited that the paper has been included in a major review paper Kensy Cooperrider by Natasha Abner and Susan
Goldin-Meadow on ‘the palm up puzzle’.
Abstract
In this paper I examine the use of
the ‘rotated palms’ gesture family among speakers of Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal),
as recorded in a video corpus
documenting this language. In this family of gestures one or both forearms are rotated to a supine
(‘palm up’) position, each hand with thumb and forefinger extended and the
other fingers, in varying degrees, flexed toward the palm. When used
independently of speech this gesture tends to be performed in a relatively
consistent manner, and is recognised as an interrogative gesture throughout
India and Nepal. In this use it can be considered an emblem. When used with
speech it shows more variation, but can still be used to indicate the interrogative
nature of what is said, even when the speech may not indicate interrogativity
in its linguistic construction. I analyse the form and function of this
gesture in Syuba and argue that there are a number distinct functions relating
to interrogativity. This can therefore be considered as a family of gestures.
This research lays the groundwork for better understand of this common family
of gestures across the South Asian area, and beyond.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2018. Contexts of use of a rotated palms gesture among Syuba (Kagate) speakers in Nepal. Gesture 17(1): 37–64. [Abstract]
Cooperrider, Kensy, Natasha Abner & Susan
Goldin-Meadow. 2018. The palm-up puzzle: Meanings and origins of a
widespread form in gesture and sign. Frontiers in Communication 3: 23.
doi: 10.3389/fcomm.
For the last four years one of my main projects has been the documentation of Syuba, and the development of an online Open Access archive of those materials. The corpus has been online for a year. I’ve now published a definitive guide to the collection in Language Documentation and Conservation.
The article includes an overview of the history of the project, the conventions used in the collection, and what the online corpus contains. This is part of my own believe that linguists should care about the data on which their research in based. This article is also part of a growing trend in transparency in language documentation, which in part aims to acknowledge that the development of corpora is an underacknowledged academic activity (see this recent LSA draft resolution on the evaluation of language documentation corpora for hiring, tenure and promotion).
Writing this article was a very useful exercise for me. It made me consider what was in the corpus and add a few more things (like the academic articles written), and make a few more things open access (you can now download the FLEx file including the dictionary). It also meant that I created a definitive summary of what is in the corpus.
The collection contains the following:
video recordings (114 MTS recordings, approx. 14.6
hours)
I can strongly recommend this activity to anyone who has built a language documentation corpus. It helps you have a go-to summary (I will now cite the heck out of this), and makes it easier for others to access your materials and use all the hard work you’ve done (while also saying “hey, I’m working on these topics at the moment” to prevent research scooping).
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the collection “Kagate (Syuba)”,
archived with both the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources
in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and the Endangered Language Archive
(ELAR). It provides an overview of the materials that have been
archived, as well as details of the workflow, conventions used, and
structure of the collection. It also provides context for the content of
the collection, including an overview of the language context, and some
of the motivations behind the documentation project. This article thus
provides an entry point to the collection. The future plans for the
collection – from the perspectives of both the researcher and Syuba
speakers – are also outlined, but with the overwhelming majority of
items in the collection available to others, it is hoped that this
article will encourage use of the materials by other researchers.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2018. A Guide to the Syuba (Kagate) Language Documentation Corpus. Language Documentation & Conservation 12: 204-234. [Open Access PDF]
Jackal and Pheasant picture book in Syuba, Nepali and English
This book is an illustration of a story we recorded in Syuba called “Jackal and Pheasant”, as part of the documentation
of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Jolene Tan
as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore lead by Joan Kelly to connect students in
the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language
documentation.
This small project demonstrates how digital resources can be useful for making a variety of outputs. The story was originally told in Syuba, and then translated into Nepali and English. We made versions that are only English or Syuba, and then bilingual versions in Syuba/English and Syuba/Nepali. English speakers can purchase the mono- or bi-lingual versions, while Nepali speakers can also access the story, and Syuba speakers can read a copy only in Syuba, or also in another language.
We used slightly different formatting styles for the bilingual (above) and monolingual (below) versions. Thanks to Emily Gref for formatting the final books from Jolene’s images.
Stories and
Songs from Kagate - illustrated picture book
This book is an illustrated collection of stories from the documentation of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Ng Xiao Yan as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore to connect students in the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language documentation. The illustrations are beautiful, I’m still in awe of how well she captured features of Syuba life.
From the introduction:
This book contains stories and songs om Kagate speakers.
The original recordings were made in 2014 with a number of Kagate
people. Some of these stories are traditional folk tales, and you will
see that many of them involve animal characters. Some of the stories
are personal experience stories. We also have the texts of some songs
written by Kagate people. Kagate people want to share their language
and their culture with the world.
The recordings of songs and stories were made as part of a project
by Joan Kelly and Lauren Gawne, funded by Nanyang Technological
University for “the development of artistic and participatory means
of recording, writing and transmitting the stories and knowledge of
Kagate, an endangered language of Nepal”. This project also funded the
illustrations by Ng Xiao Yan, transcription work and other production
costs. Further work on the volume, including Nepali translations
by Rinchen A. Lama, was funded by the project “Documenting and
describing Kagate, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal”
run by Lauren Gawne and funded by the Endangered Languages
Documentation Project. The original recordings can be found online
at The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS. Thank you to Ningmar
Tamang, who worked on the nal text. Thank you also to Emily Gref
for editorial and technical assistance and The Firebird Foundation,
Awesome Foundation and Stack Exchange for funding an initial period
of work with the Kagate community.
Nepal is home to 123 languages, some of which are spoken across entire
regions, while others only have a small number of speakers. The more you
travel around Nepal, the more you will get the chance to meet speakers
of these languages. All native languages are recognised as national
languages in the Constitution of Nepal, although Nepali is the official
language of government administration.
In the article briefly introduce Newar, Sherpa, Tamang, Tharu and Nepali. You can read the rest on the Inside Himalayas website.
Paradisec is now host to a collection of recordings from Langtang in Nepal. These recordings include traditional stories and personal histories of speakers of the Langtangpa language. Researchers are often told to think about the long term importance of endangered language material that we work with, but Becky and Radka, who worked with the Langtangpa to build the collection, were confronted with this in ways they never expected after the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, that flattened the Langtangpa villages, and killed many of the people in the recordings.
The collection is open access, and will continue to grow and be translated. Neither Becky or Radka are trained linguists, but they’ve done an amazing job of learning the workflows linguists use in language documentation to build a collection of recordings that are now an invaluable resource for both the Langtangpa community and researchers. I’ve been helping to archive the recordings, and wrote about the collection for the Paradisec blog (Endangered Languages and Cultures) when the collection went live:
While the Langtang region is well-known to as a trekking destination
in Nepal, almost nothing is known about the people who live there, the
language that they speak, and its relationship to other Tibeto-Burman
languages. The ethnic Tibetan Langtangpa population have called the
valley home for at least 4 centuries and speak a language that shares
features with those of their Kyirong neighbours in the north, and Yolmo
neighbours in the south.
On hearing that there has been no documentation made of the Langtang
language, Radka Kvicalova and Becky Slade decided to start a project in
the Basic Oral Language Documentation (BOLD) method. Neither are trained
linguists, but learnt how to use audio recorders and build the metadata
for their documentation project. Their aim was to build a project that
could be a useful record of the Langtang language for both the
community, and researchers interested in the language. They worked to
ensure that all materials would be open access archived, with written or
oral transcriptions and translations into either English or Nepali.
When I heard about their work on a field trip to Nepal I helped them
arrange an archiving plan with Paradisec. The collection is now
available as Paradisec collection LAN1.
Becky and Radka began their documentation in Langtang in 2014. While
the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal were devastating for many communities, the
residents of Langtang were particularly hard hit. The earthquake on
April 25, 2015 triggered a major avalanche that killed 187 of the 673
Langtangpa. Forty households disappeared, and many more were damaged.
Almost the entire population were forced to relocate to Kathmandu to
survive the winter. As a result of this tragedy and the ensuing
displacement of the Lantangpa, the language, cultural heritage, and
intergenerational knowledge of Langtang is increasingly at risk.
[Photograph of Langtangpa women in traditional clothing, sitting in a green valley. Taken by Lhakpa Tamang Jangba]
Becky and Radka are now working to transcribe and translate the recordings, I’ll be sure to update you on their progress. You can also read about the Langtang Memory Project another project in Langtang that I wrote about.
I am really excited that this publication is out for a number of reasons. The first is that I really like talking about the use of evidentiality in questions and answers, which is what this paper is about. The second is that it’s almost the last thing to come out of the thesis, so I can take the embargo off soon. The third is that it’s in Journal of Pragmatics, which is the most prestigious title I’ve published in to date.
Unfortunately, JPrag (as the cool kids call it) is not an open access publisher - well, at least not for the amount of money I can afford. I could have just not mentioned it here, but I think it’s worth admitting that I made a conscious choice to publish with a certain journal because they are fancy, rather than because the article would be accessible. This has a lot to do with where the article was a best fit, but (tbh) also a lot to do with the fact that I am still only tenuously employed and want to show I can publish in fancy venues, even though I hope I won’t have to forever.
You can watch a video about the highlights of the paper (and if the embedding doesn’t work you can watch it here):
Abstract
Many Tibetic (Tibeto-Burman) languages have been reported to have interrogative structures where the question uses the evidential
form that is most likely to be used in the answer. This orientation of evidential source to the perspective of the addressee has been
described as the ‘anticipation rule’ in the literature on Tibetan and related languages. I investigate interrogative use in Lamjung Yolmo, a
Tibetic variety of Nepal, to illustrate the nature of this ‘anticipation’ pattern in interaction. In Lamjung Yolmo speakers base their
‘anticipation’ of the respondent’s evidential use on the general distribution of these forms, as well as attending to their interlocutor’s
knowledge state and modifying evidential values in question-asking to better reflect the specific interactional context. I also look
specifically at self-answered questions, which provide a unique insight into evidential choice as the speaker and addressee are the same
person. Interrogative uses of evidentials in Lamjung Yolmo are an example of cognitively complex interactional use of grammatical forms.
This paper furthers our knowledge of the relationship between evidentiality and interrogativity, and demonstrates one way people can
track each other’s knowledge status in interaction.
Just in time for my return home, I have a new article about mapmaking, which you’ll know is something I’ve been getting more and more involved with over the last few years. The article is an introduction to mapmaking, particularly with regards to minority and endangered languages. It provides an introduction to some of the theory of mapmaking, and provides walk-throughs of making maps with Google Maps, TileMill and CartoDB (fun disclosure fact - I’m a CartoDB ambassador).
I wrote this article with Hiram Ring. When I was at NTU as a postdoc in 2014-2015 Hiram was finishing his PhD, this paper came out of a whole bunch of discussions we had about the best way of mapping languages for academic and non-academic publications. We even include a couple of data sets so you can work though the paper and make pretty maps like this:
LD&C is an Open Access publisher, so you can download the article and dataset directly from their website: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/24692
Abstract
This paper introduces readers to mapmaking as part of language documentation.
We discuss some of the benefts and ethical challenges in producing good maps,
drawing on linguistic geography and GIS literature. We then describe current
tools and practices that are useful when creating maps of linguistic data, particularly using locations of field sites to identify language areas/boundaries. We
demonstrate a basic work ow that uses CartoDB, before demonstrating a more
complex work ow involving Google Maps and TileMill. We also discuss presentation and archiving of mapping products. The majority of the tools identified
and used are open source or free to use.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren, & Ring, Hiram. (2016). Mapmaking for Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation and Conservation, 10, 188–242. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/24692
I’m back in the UK after a four month visit to Nepal. It was, on the whole, a productive four months, even with getting ill a record-breaking number of times in the first couple of months. Here are some of the highlights:
Getting to see everyone again, for the first time since the earthquakes in 2015. My last fieldtrip was scheduled for a week after the April 12th earthquake last year, and promptly cancelled, so it had been over a year since I’d seen people, and how they were going.
Taking colleagues from NTU’s School of Art, Design & Media to the Syuba community to make art with the kids.
Returning copies of a book that one of my NTU students made about basket weaving in Lamjung.
Finally going to Ilam, the only major population of Yolmo speakers I hadn’t yet spent any time with.
Introducing speakers of Syuba, Lamjung Yolmo and Ilam Yolmo to each other - and watching as they discovered the similarities in their languages and histories.
Running a set of experiments, including a tone perception test (more info soon).
Starting to work with the Langtang language. I’m helping archive a language documentation project from Langtang (more info soon) and have become involved with the Langtang Memory Project. I didn’t make it to Langtang this time, but that’s why there’s always another fieldtrip planned, right?
Coming Up!
Now that I’m back from Nepal and, in the world of reliable internet and electricity, I’ll return to posting twice a week here.
Just because fieldwork is over doesn’t mean I’m keeping still for long - in a couple of weeks I’ll be in Alaska for CoLang, a two week summer school for Language Documentation and Revitalisation. I’ll be teaching a one week course on Wikipedia with Gretchen McCulloch and a one hour seminar on including children in language documentation and revitalisation with Barb Kelly.
In July I’ll be heading to the International Conference for Gesture Studies in Paris. The preliminary schedule looks great, and I’ll definitely be live tweeting.
For now though, I’m enjoying a bit of London summer, and quite a bit of bread and cheese.
Today marks the first anniversary of the first massive earthquake that devastated Nepal. It marks the end of what has been a long and horrible year for many Nepalis. Although the quakes made international headlines, the subsequent challenges have not received the same attention.
Earthquakes cause immediate destruction, but they also lead to ongoing
problems. The water table in many parts of the country has vanished into
the shaken earth, leading to a water shortage in many place.
There have also been continuing aftershocks, which not only continue to
put pressure on houses that remain standing, but also on peoples’
fragile nerves.
After Parliament finally promulgated a constitution that has been 7 years in the drafting, people in the Madhesh on the Indian border took offense at several key features and protested, resulting in a five
month shutdown of Nepal’s most vital trade route. For five months there was a shortage of medication, and fuel and gas, if available at all, was purchased at
inflated prices “on the black” (market).
Overall, the communities I work with in Lamjung and Ramechhap have been doing ok. Many whose houses were damaged have not waited for any government assistance, but have started to rebuild on their own. Their farms have meant that they have not faced the same degree of shortages as people in urban centres.
One community that suffered acutely over this past year have been the Langtangpa , who live in the Langtang region up near the Tibetan border. The earthquakes triggered huge landslides that obliterated their village. With a population of fewer than a thousand, they loss of 187 people.
In the face of all that has happened this community have started to return to their land after the winter cold to begin the process of rebuilding their homes and their lives. I’ve come to know about the Langtangpa through helping a language documentation project with archiving their materials. I’ll hopefully have more about that to share with you soon!
Another initiative has been the Langtang Memory Project. This project aims to provide a web space as well as a physical site in Langtang where the traditions, culture, language and future of the Langtangpa can be shared with everyone. One particularly poignant collection is the display of photographs found amongst the rubble of people’s homes.
If you have ever been trekking in Langtang and have photos or other items that can be shared you can contact the Memory Centre team.
Langtang before the earthquake. Image taken by Pasang Tamang, from the Langtang Memory Project.
