Prof. Bornini Lahiri
Chief Investigator and Consortium Leader · Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
I have special interest in the features of minor and endangered languages of India. I have been involved in documenting and describing various minor languages of West Bengal since last six years. Some of them are Dhimal, Mahali, Toto, Kurmali etc. I have helped in building corpus and creating digital dictionaries for some of these languages. I am interested in developing tools for the minor languages of India as these languages are often less-resourced and hence lesser used than the major languages of the country which adds to the vulnerability of the language. I also study ethno-linguistic features of the languages which bring out amazing facts about languages and the related cultures. Studying contact induced languages in the languages is also one of my research areas. The contact induced changes become more fascinating for me when the languages belong to different language families. Like, one of my studies explores the effect of Indo-Aryan language on a minor Tibeto-Burman language.
I have some works on applied linguistics where I have tried to locate the problems of second language learning. One of such studies reports, an investigation of English spelling errors by the students of native Hindi speakers. English spelling error is a very common problem of our country where Hindi is a major language and most of the school education is done through English medium. Many interesting facts are revealed in the study.
I am also interested in typology. I explored noun cases of seven Eastern Indo-Aryan (EIA) languages for my Ph.D. It was an intra-genetic work based on primary data. Cognitive Framework was used to describe the cases. Cases in EIA languages show dense polysemous network, which has been justified in the study.