Himalayan Linguistics

Lamkang (ISO 639-3 code: lmk) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, India with under 10,000 speakers. As a part of revitalization and documentation efforts, members of the community have begun to record oral literature, personal histories, Bible translations, and the like in written form. The spelling conventions followed by these writers are mostly consistent with those used in current translations of the Bible. However, there continues to be variation across different writers. The different variants will need to be reconciled as the Lamkang move towards a single orthographic standard. In this paper, we present findings from samples of writing collected over the course of the first author’s 12 years of work with community writers and aim to characterize variations in the orthography in linguistic terms. We then compare these variations to orthographic variations in related South Central languages. Our goal is to provide an analysis of orthographic variation focusing on phonological and morphological structure. Existing literature on literacy shows that metalinguistic awareness can impact processing the written word, suggesting that this awareness, or lack thereof, could also impact orthographic choice. These linguistic factors, along with aesthetics and identity, may be used to explain and contribute to resolving orthographic variation in languages with similar structures.