Dialect geography and dialectometry of Ladakh (UT Ladakh, India)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Gerhard Jäger; Dr. Bettina Zeisler
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572933900

Ladakh, a high-altitude region in northern India, is home to a dense and complex dialect landscape within the West Tibetan language group. The dialects of this region differ significantly in phonology, lexicon, and grammar—particularly in tense/aspect marking, case systems, and evidentiality. Despite this diversity, there has been no comprehensive, data-driven study of their distribution, classification, and mutual relationships. The goal of this project is to document and analyze the grammatical and lexical variation among Ladakhi dialects based on extensive fieldwork and computational modeling. The first principal investigator will carry out three extended field stays in Ladakh, during which she will collect new data from a wide range of village dialects. Through structured elicitation, speaker interviews, and recordings, she will compile a comparative dataset including both core vocabulary items and key grammatical constructions. Importantly, the project also gathers metalinguistic data, capturing speakers’ perceptions of mutual intelligibility and dialect identity. The project emphasizes a participatory methodology that treats speakers as active collaborators. This approach facilitates the discovery of structures and distinctions that would likely remain hidden under standard elicitation techniques. In the second phase, the data will be curated and analyzed using computational methods from dialectometry and phylogenetic linguistics. These include pairwise distance computation, tree inference, dimensionality reduction, and spatial modeling. By comparing classifications based on different feature domains—phonological, lexical, grammatical—the project will reveal the relative importance of these domains in dialect differentiation. It will also assess the degree to which computationally derived classifications align with speakers’ intuitions and patterns of intelligibility. The outcome will be a multi-perspective classification of the Ladakhi dialects, grounded in empirical data and reflecting both structural relationships and social-linguistic perception. All curated data will be published in accordance with FAIR principles and made available for reuse in future research and language preservation efforts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants