Nar and Phu Lexical and Discourse Material

Language	Nar, Phu
Depositor	Kristine Hildebrandt
Affiliation	Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Location	Nepal
Collection ID	0103
Grant ID	SG0025
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/8292d4b0-9092-4b89-96ef-05d2618a2824

 

Podcast

 

Showreel

 

Summary of the collection

This collection includes documentation and archival quality data on Nar-Phu towards a comparative lexical database with Nepali and Nyeshangte. In addition, this collection also includes a transcribed, annotated corpus to facilitate analyses of the discourse function of morphosyntactic structures and a Nar-Phu/Nepali word book aimed at primary school use, and copies of recordings for community archival and reference.

 

Group represented

Nar-Phu community, in Manang District, Nepal

 

Language information

Nar and Phu are mutually intelligible variants of the TGTM (Tamangic) sub-grouping of Tibeto-Burman, and are spoken in villages of the same names in Nepal. The geo-coordinates for Nar village are (Gandaki Zone) 28° 40′ N; 84°11′ E, and for Phu village (Gandaki Zone) are 28°45′ N; 84°15′ E. The Ethnologue ISO 639 for Nar-Phu is NPA. The endoym for Nar is Chyprung and for Phu is Nartwe. Despite their close lexical, grammatical and phonological similarities, there is a good deal of cross-dialectal variation between the two. Current estimated speaker numbers of Nar are at fewer than 400, and Phu has perhaps 200 active speakers. Observations of outward emigration from Nar and Phu villages to Kathmandu or overseas, combined with data from language attitude and usage interviews and information gleaned from autobiographical texts, suggest that Nar-Phu is moribund. The vast majority of fluent speakers are above the age of fifty, and there is extreme disruption in transmission of the language to younger adults and children.

 

Collection contents

This collection contains audio and video recordings with accompanying transcriptions and annotation of the Nar and Phu languages. The content is a mixture of personal narratives and folktales alongside wordlists and responses to experimental stimuli sets. There are also recordings of responses to stimulus sets created at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and video recordings of people at work and leisure.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of the collection should cite Kristine A. Hildebrandt as the collector, ELDP as the funder, and the individual speakers (by name) when their words or audio-video materials are used.

To refer to any data from the corpus, please cite the corpus in this way:

Hildebrandt, Kristine. 2011. Nar and Phu Lexical and Discourse Material.  Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0001-D940-1. Accessed on [insert date here].