Himalayan Linguistics

This work is a descriptive grammar of Denjongke, or Sikkimese Bhutia (also known as Lhoke or Sikkimese) (ISO 639-3 sip), an underdescribed and endangered Tibeto-Burman, Tibetic language spoken in the Indian state of Sikkim. The study is based on original fieldwork conducted over more than six years. The theoretical framework is functionalist-typological and may further be characterized as an application of Basic Linguistic Theory, which relies on the power of prose, instead of formalisms, to describe linguistic phenomena. Traditional grammatical terms are complemented by recourse to up-to-date typological information. The discussion is data-oriented and aims to describe Denjongke on its own terms, making a distinction between language-internal descriptive categories and cross-linguistic comparative concepts.

(A complete abstract is included in the grammar)