JAIPUR: Researchers at IIT Jodhpur are documenting the language and cultural knowledge of Bhil communities in Rajasthan's Thar region, while also studying a rare number system in Mundari and the use of Tamil among migrant families in Switzerland.
The research is led by Dr Gurujegan Murugesan, Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts. It combines field visits, linguistic analysis and grammar writing to study how languages preserve culture, shape knowledge and evolve across generations and regions.
“When a language becomes endangered, it is not only the language that is at risk. The cultural knowledge and ways of life encoded through that language are also vulnerable. Our fieldwork therefore focuses on documenting the language as well as understanding the knowledge carried by the community through it,” Murugesan said.
In Rajasthan, researchers are working with Bhil communities in the Osian region to study how language reflects knowledge developed through life in the Thar desert, including housing, food, clothing and water conservation practices.
The team is also examining how this knowledge is passed on as younger generations become less fluent in the language spoken by their elders. Researchers visit the communities every semester to collect linguistic data and document traditional practices. Students also take part in the fieldwork.
Another project focuses on Mundari, an Austro-Asiatic language spoken by Munda communities in Jharkhand. Researchers have identified what they describe as a rare number system and are studying how it works and what it reveals about grammatical structures in human languages.
The third project studies Tamil spoken by second-generation migrant families in Switzerland, who use Tamil at home and Swiss German or French in their daily lives. The research examines how multilingual environments influence the way young people learn and use Tamil.
The project is being carried out with Professor Anita Auer of the University of Lausanne and is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Indian Council of Social Science Research.
IIT Jodhpur said the three projects combine field linguistics, grammar studies and sociolinguistics to understand how language carries community knowledge and changes over time and across societies.