Presented by Samir Debbarma , Shobhana Chelliah, Merrion Dale also on Project Team October 1, 2020 Jim Matisoff, Jonathan Evans Connecting legacy materials and community linguists

▪ Mary and Shobhana’s trip to Berkeley

▪ Jim Matisoff’s Field methods class notes KokBorok language

~1m speakers, in 2011 census of

Rural (70-80%) – speaking Kokborok Urban () – speaking Bengali

More and more, people shift to towns for work, and children speak Hindi there. ELF Language Legacies grant

Original plan: a. Providing training and equipment for scanning b. Providing training for data management and archiving c. Co-creating collection with KokBorok linguist and community ELF Language Legacies grant

Pivot plan: a. Samir working with our partners in Assam (Boro linguist Prafulla Basumatary) to learn more about scanning and documentation methods b. We create a CoRSAL collection from the scanned Matisoff fieldnotes at UNT c. Samir Debbarma’s further documentation plans Progress!

● Field method notes have been scanned ● Metadata sleuthing ● Permission from Dan Jurafsky and consultant Prashanta Samir’s planned activities Textual material

• Older material written in Bengali script • A few politicians (BJP party) favor Devanagari • Difficult for native speakers to switch between Bengali and Devanagari • Two committees for scripts: 1991 (Script Selection Committee) & 2005 (Tripura Upajati Bhasa commission) • Majority want to use roman script, but this is not yet implemented • While there is no reference grammar, there is creative writing • Curating these writings can help create a corpus Collaborative Language Archiving Curriculum Next steps

Training students at Tripura University Department of KokBorok language in scanning, making collections

Folklore, KokBorok history and literature

Students creating their own site backed up to CoRSAL

Collecting and scanning writings from elders