 Okay, welcome everyone my name is Joey Love Strand I'm a British Academy post doctor fellow at so as University of London, and thanks to everyone who's here for this linguistics webinar. Our presenter is another British Academy post doctoral fellow at so as Tim bot who's currently working with the Department of East Asian languages and cultures. And as we're working on the documentation of a language called Kasunda which will be sharing with us today. So Tim thanks for joining us thanks for creating this presentation for us to get to interact with what you're doing. And we look forward to seeing what you have to share. Okay. Thank you very much Joey for this introduction thank you also very much for organizing these webinars and organizing the webinar today, as well as for inviting me to a give a short talk here. I would like to share my screens with you. If all works well, you can now see a PowerPoint starting screen. So thank you very much again Joey and good afternoon good evening good night good morning to everyone present here. And thank you for attending. A postdoc on at so as is indeed evolving around the Kusunda language spoken in Nepal. And I have made a small addition here to the title, compared to the invitation that you may have seen earlier. So as far as we know, at this moment, there is only one speaker of Kusunda left in the world. Based on all the available evidence from Nepal itself there's only one lady who still speaks the language. There are some unsubstantiated rumors that there may be a few more people who migrated as laborers to India. However, no one has been able to locate them and contact them so we really don't know and for all practical purposes, we must consider that there's only one speaker of Kusunda left in the world. In this webinar I would like to address two main issues. The first one is the current ongoing efforts of the documentation and description of Kusunda. And the second one are the efforts for revitalization of Kusunda. And in order to give you a little bit of background, I'll first give an introduction to Kusunda and I'll also explain how I became involved with the Kusunda language and its speaker speakers at that time. So here we have a map of Nepal and in the western part of Nepal there are several districts and between records you can see some figures. These indicate the number of Kusunda people who ethnically identify as Kusunda, according to Uday Raj Ali's 2017 publication. So it's a really low number of people and you can see that if you connect these areas with some historical evidence of where Kusunda speakers were found. You kind of get an arch shaped figure in the middle hills of western Nepal and this is the area where we can presume that Kusunda was spoken in the past. And there are still some speakers at present. However, this limited distribution and this low number of speakers does not really mean that Kusunda was always such a small group. Until recently the Kusunda led a primarily nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle this day maintained until the mid 19th century. Sorry, the mid 20th century, and they lived in the forest they moved from place to place they did not have any permanent settlements and like this model that Ganymaaya is constructing here, and they would make small lean tools out of branches and leaves, and they would, depending on the availability of forest resources, they would move from place to place. And while in the forest, the Kusunda dependent on these forest resources they collected mushrooms fruits berries dug for tubers root crops. And other forest products and the Kusunda men were also very apt in hunting and they use this kind of bows with very long arrows to hunt animals birds like jungle full hilt partridge college pheasant, but also animals like monitor lizard see that cats squirrels, basically any animal that would roost or live in trees, and have claws or talons and that is quite peculiar because they had a kind of a taboo on hunting and hoofed animals, for example, barking deer or or Goral or wild boar. So they had a very limited range of animals that they would basically hunt. They also never really practiced agriculture and they never reared any domestic animals. And the Kusunda women developed a practice of going to the nearby villages with the sedentary population with their force produce and their exchange it for other products that they needed themselves at that moment. For example, food grains or sold or whatever. In absence of force produce, they also tended to have this habit of going for begging in villages for products and because of their position they were, they were kind of considered the kings of the forest. People would quite readily actually share some of their food grains with Kusunda people who came to ask for it. There are several reasons for the decline in the Kusunda population. As is common for hunter-gatherer societies, they were probably never really numerous to start with. And every small band or family group of Kusunda would move from place to place. And they would marry within their own tribe, within the Kusunda, but not within their own clan. So it was kind of a kind of a necessary for different Kusunda bands to meet each other in order to find marriageable spouses. During the Rana regime in Nepal, which lasted from 1846 to 1951 and especially the subsequent panchayat system of governments that lasted from 1960 to 1990, the official policies in Nepal very much promoted ideas such as Ek Raza Ek Desh, Ek Bahasa Ek Desh, One King, One Dress, One Language, One Nation. And within that national integration policy there was very little room for ethnic and linguistic consciousness. At the same time, we can see that improved healthcare sanitation and education resulted in population growth and in order to feed that growing population, the agricultural area was expanded, and that often went at the expense of the forest resources. So the government realizing that there was increasing deforestation then instituted the kind of nationalization of forests in which local communities were more and more told to no longer use the forest resources without the government permission. And as a result, the Kusunda were more or less forced to move out of the forest, but they were not really given an alternative. Because they neither owned land or had the means to buy land, they were forced to move into villages and live there on the land owned by others and become sharecroppers or wounded laborers, and they lost their nomadic lifestyle. And because of that, the various Kusunda bands, the family groups could no longer meet each other, and there was an increasing lack of marriage partners. As a result of that, the Kusunda people had very little option except for marriage outside of their tribe. So they would marry with Chitri, with Thakuri, with Magar, with Kham, or with any other ethnic group, but they could not marry with other Kusunda anymore. And as a result, they assimilated linguistically as well as culturally to other ethnic groups, other castes in Nepal. And as a result of that, fewer and fewer people learned Kusunda as their mother tongue, fewer and fewer people were able to speak the language. A little bit about previous research and the history. The first mention of the Kusunda and their language, at least in the Western literature, was by Brian Houghton-Hodson, his publications in the mid 19th century. And he considered the Chippang and the Kusunda as the broken tribes of Nepal. And he already made a rather grim remark about the possible future of these two tribes. And unfortunately, this has basically become the reality for the Kusunda. Luckily, the Chippang are still in a better position as far as their cultural and linguistic heritage is concerned. And perhaps it was Robert Schaefer in his 1953 publication on East Himalayas and his 1954 publication on the ethnography of ancient India who first came up with the idea that Kusunda was maybe not related to any other language or language family in the world, but rather a language isolate. In the late 1960s, Johann Reinhardt, who I think is also present here today, went on a search and made video and audio recordings of the Kusunda people, their language and their culture, and the linguistic description he wrote together with and published in 1970. And several of his ethnographic descriptions are basically the first detailed accounts of the Kusunda, their culture and their language. And the recordings that he made are a very priceless snapshot of Kusunda language and Kusunda culture and life in the past. And this really illustrates the value of documenting languages and cultures by ethnographers and by linguists and making video recordings, making audio recordings, etc. And in his 1976 publication, Johann Reinhardt expressed the hope that someone would actually go back into Nepal and meet with Kusunda and do some more research on the Kusunda before they would become extinct completely. So in on the early 1980s, Ross Coffley made an attempt to contact some Kusunda speakers. He met someone that person was already quite ages passed away and that was before any proper description could be made. And the same basically happened during the late 1980s when several Nepali researchers and academics met with elderly Kusunda people who still knew about their culture, who still spoke their language, but one by one they passed away before any proper description could be made. So more or less the idea came into being that Kusunda, even though there were still Kusunda people, the Kusunda language and the Kusunda culture had disappeared. Since the beginning of the 21st century several Nepali linguists have conducted research and published articles on Kusunda. And these researchers were able to identify several Kusunda who could still speak their language. In 2004, David Waters, together with some of his Nepali counterparts, invited Gianni Maya, Kamala and Prem Bahadur, and they were able to make recordings that resulted in the first grammatical description of Kusunda published in 2006. And in 2013, Mark Donahue and Wojtek Gautam published an article based on their work and their recordings together with Gianni Maya. So despite the fact that really until 2005 there were not many descriptions of Kusunda, I said some vocabularies, there were a lot of people who tried to link Kusunda with other languages and language families to kind of disprove the Schaefer's assumption that Kusunda was a language isolate. And some of these theories have since then been rebuked, there have been some new theories. But at the moment there's not really any conclusive evidence about the genetic relationship of Kusunda, whether it is a language isolate, whether it is related to languages more closer nearby or further afield. And like many linguists working on the Kusunda or in the Himalayas, I had heard about Kusunda, but I had presumed it to be extinct. So I knew it was a language isolate, but I thought, okay, there's not much to do regarding Kusunda anymore. However, in September 2018, while I was in Nepal, I received a request from a colleague at the Max Planck's Institute in Jena. And I think Meisin, she is also here, welcome Meisin. And thank you for introducing me to Kusunda without you. This would never have been possible. And I received a request to find a book which was recently published. And this is the book Kusunda Tribe and Dictionary by Uday Raj Ali. And I managed to locate him via via and through this I managed to, he came to Kathmandu and there we met and I was very much impressed by him as a community linguist. He has been working on Taru language, he's been working on Kusunda and he has really done a lot of good work. He is very dedicated, he's very motivated. So that his, it was kind of a, how do you say, like a contagious disease, but then a good one. So his involvement with the Kusunda kind of jumped over to me. And especially when he started saying like, okay, the Kusunda people themselves, although there are not very many of them and although they're not many speakers, they're really interested to have their language documented described and even revitalized to the extent that people will start speaking it again. And both his enthusiasm and his, the way he expressed the wish of the Kusunda people made me think like, okay, there has to be a way in which we can work more towards this. And after some discussion we found it important that we should make recordings of these last two Kusunda speakers that he was aware of, and in through the documentation contribute to the ability now or in the future to further describe the language. We would I and I managed to obtain funds from several organizations as well as from very generous people through crowdfunding, which enabled us basically to kickstart this is this process to kickstart our project to further document Kusunda. And then we then met in Kathmandu in Nepal in late July and early August 2019. So our recordings consist of elicitation sessions monologues and conversations. We basically had around 50 hours of audio recordings and 22 hours of video recordings and out of these 50 and 22 hours around 2020 hours are basically purely in the Kusunda language. There's a little bit of code switching with Nepali, but there is no speaking in Nepali by me or by a guy or speaking in English. It's basically in Kusunda elicitation, for example, vocabulary or verbal paradigms was fairly minor component of our approach. We record a word list on the request of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, and we did cross check some of the verbal paradigms that waters had earlier described. But it was not the main purpose of our recordings. There were monologues, although we did record them we invited the speakers to talk about themselves and their personal history, the history of the Kusunda, the mythology of the Kusunda. And there are few views on the Kusunda and their language and some of their personal experiences. So for example, Jenny Maya told us about how she and her mother used to go into the villages to beg for food grains. And sorry, Kamala was the one to tell us about the begging process in the villages. And Jenny Maya told us about her life, nomadic life in the forest. And she told us about medicinal plants about the different stages of life in Kusunda culture so from birth till death, etc. However, the primary objective of our recordings was very much conversations because these were as far as we knew, and as far as we know now the last two speakers of Kusunda so we wanted them to interact to convince each other to argue with each other to discuss with each other, in order to get a much wider repertoire of linguistic features. We use different methods to encourage them to talk. For example, we asked them to talk about their shared experiences, their earlier visit to Kathmandu for example. And we also showed them a video that John Reiner that made in the late 1960s and asked them to comment on it what they saw. And another method that we used was existing materials. So we had two English storybooks, we had four Nepali storybooks and we just asked them, what do you see? Just to describe the pictures that were there and we realized that the frog story or the English children's book storybooks were a bit more difficult to relate to than for example this kind of pictures about typical Nepali household life, typical Nepali village life in which they were really able to very, in a very engaged way talk about it, oh this is this, this is this, no it is this and discuss about what they saw. So we asked them to talk about these pictures, these images, and we are planning to use at a future moment also to ask those authors of these children's books, the publishers, whether we could maybe make another publication, a reprint in which the Nepali is replaced by Kusunda written in the Devanagari script. So just to create the kind of children's books for Kusunda children to learn their language. We also want to explore other options such as for example Bloom Community Books. However, the main problem is that it's such a small community, it will be quite difficult to find the funding to publish these storybooks. All in all, we think that our recordings were quite a success and it was also very timely on hindsight. In January 2020, humanity lost a great person. The second last speaker of Kusunda and the great repository of knowledge on the Kusunda culture, their nomadic life, the stages of life, the medicinal plants and many other aspects of the culture. After a short illness, Yanni Maya, whom you see pictured here, passed away and she was buried according to Kusunda customs. And we all remember Yanni Maya and her contribution to our knowledge of the Kusunda language and people. Unfortunately, what Kamala had expressed during the recordings became true. If you are gone, who will I have to talk to? And it's very difficult to imagine that you are the only person left in the world who speaks a language that is your mother tongue, that is the language that you grew up with. And especially because there's no language which is even remotely related to Kusunda, so there's no one who speaks even something similar to what Kamala speaks. And yeah, it also made me realize how timely our recordings actually were because if we had waited just for another six months, we would not have been able to record what we did. So at this moment we still have Kamala as our language consultant as the last speaker of Kusunda who can help us with this work. And we need to make maximum use of that advantage. And hopefully the corpus that we then produce can provide the basis for the subsequent analysis and description of Kusunda, but also for the revitalization efforts. One important element of what I'm working on right now is to create an Elan to flex workflow that will incorporate multiple participants, but also multiple autographies, multiple translations. There are multiple languages in which translations can be made, for example, English and Nepali, but also Divanagri, Autography, IPA, Autography, Latin, Autography or Roman, Autography, etc. The main objective is to enable local language consultants with limited software and computer skills to transcribe and translate recordings and check and adjust proposals for the parsing and glossing. And I think especially now with the pandemic and it has made us realize that also because of climate change but mainly because of the pandemic that travel is not always possible extended field work periods may not always be feasible or possible. And from that extent it's always good to have local language consultants who are able to work together on documenting and describing languages. However, as many linguists here will be aware Elan and Flex are complex software with rather steep learning curves that require quite a lot of insight and practice. And if they're not easy to use for trained field linguists at the MA or PhD level, then we can only imagine how it must be for community linguists who have much less formal training. So SIL has developed say more as a user friendly simple software that could also be used by community linguists the main disadvantages that it does not allow for multiple participants. Moving on this integrated approach where we can segment, transcribe and translate recordings in Elan then converted to flex where it can be further annotated into linearized and then converted back to Elan where the language consultants can check our analysis or the analysis and then subsequently suggest make suggestions for corrections etc. I've actually submitted an article that describes this workflow. And once it is reviewed, I will make the manual that I prepared on basis of my workflow I'll make it available so hopefully there will be other people who will be benefited as well. For Kusunda we aimed for an English translation in the international audience as well as a Nepali translation aimed at the audience in Nepal the people linguists etc and Nepal but also the language developers who wanted to develop the Kusunda language. And there will be a phonetic transcription in IPA so actually representing the speech of the individual speech at participants and because both Jenny Maya and Kusum Kamla spoke a different variety of Kusunda. We also looking for a phonemic transcription and this phonemic transcription in IPA will then be used for a Devon Agri transcription in Kusunda, which can actually be used for revitalization for teaching purposes. In addition, it's our aim to preserve the language consultants original transcription both in IPA and Devon Agri because this might give further indications or tips or advice or something when we are later analyzing the text, the recordings and I will now show you an example. So I hope everyone can see here a Elan segment from an Elan project file and here we have the recording one of the recordings to Kusunda recordings and here we can use the play button. So, segment by segment after segmentation segment by segment the transcriber can transcribe the recording in the IPA you can add an English and Nepali translation, also a transcription in Devon Agri in Kusunda in the Devon Agri script. And in this way, even if someone does not know English, for example, he can still give the translation in Nepali in Devon Agri script, or if someone does not really know IPA he can just put triple X here and then give the transcription of Kusunda in the Devon Agri script. And then later we can add the transcription in IPA based on the orthography that we have established for the language. So in that way, even people whose primary language is not English or who have very limited command of English will be able to still, if they are trained, use this to transcribe and translate texts. And we can then convert that to flex and hopefully you will see the flex interface here, where in this analyze tab of the text and word session section, we can find the same segment, but now annotate it so broken up morphemes words broken up in in morphemes and then annotate it, get parsed, glossed, and the translations are down here the English translation, the Nepali translation, the phonetic transcription, and the community transcription, the transcription by the community linguist both in the IPA and in the Devon Agri scripts. And we can then again convert that to Elan. And here we can see that the same morpheme words, the different glosses and parses that we had made in flex are represented here. And on basis of this, the language consultant or the transcriber can have another look he can play the sound file again. And then he can decide what what what else should be added or deleted, whether there are any mistakes changes whether he agrees with the, he or she agrees with the, the different morpheme glosses that we made, etc. I will also show a small example of the annotation mode, where we can hear see the video and here we can find the various segments as well as the transcription of the segments in the various scripts and the translation of the segments in the various scripts. Here we can play the video. And in this way, we can further annotate the recording. So that about the flex and Elan part. Now to proceed with the revitalization efforts for Kusunda in the past two decades. And those changes have taken place politically and socially in Nepal. I remember the first time when I came to Nepal. It was still the last Hindu kingdom in the world this was followed by the civil strife by the most insurgency, and then by the political strife between different political parties and and fractions within political parties, mostly involving around egos it seems rather than about political ideals. But yeah despite these continued struggles in Nepal one of the major outcomes of this whole democratization process in Nepal has been the federal democratic structure in which more and more progressively more attention is being brought to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the nation. And this is encouraging ethnic cultural and linguistic consciousness among people who for very long time were marginalized within this within this Hindu based caste based system social structure of the country. The constitution of Nepal itself is very clear in its recognition of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the people, and at least in theory, the government has given far reaching rights to the people, but also responsibilities of the state to secure these rights that have been enshrined within the constitution, and perhaps this makes Nepal one of the most progressive countries in South Asia in that respect. In order to achieve some of these goals, especially as far as the linguistic part is concerned, the Nepal Language Commission was instituted and this commission has a national mandate, and till present they have identified 131 languages in Nepal. So the commission has been supporting linguists including community linguists in the documentation and description of these languages and the cultures of the people that speak them, which has resulted in surveys and grammatical descriptions dictionaries teaching materials and other outputs. And one of the languages in which the for which the Language Commission has been supporting work is Kusunda. And the Nepal Language Commission has supported Uday to describe Kusunda to develop an orthography in the Devanag re-script to prepare teaching materials and to actually teach the Kusunda language. The first publication was a Kusunda Jati Rasabda Kos or the Kusunda Tribe and Dictionary, a 175 page book that did with an introduction both English and Nepali, and a Kusunda Nepali English vocabulary. And if anyone is interested, I still have some copies on which I can share on Uday's behalf. So please let me know afterwards. The second publication is the Kusundam Hasako Itihas or history of the Kusunda language, which is a 66 page book that details the available knowledge on the Kusunda history, culture and language, but this is only available in Nepali. So to get to the actual revitalization part, the revitalization of Kusunda is not so much something that we shoot which was imposed by politicians or by linguists or by other other external agents, but very much something we want expressed by the community themselves. And this can also be seen in this wider process of increased ethnic and linguistic consciousness in Nepal, where the Kusunda people realize that their language, their culture, their origin, their history, their feelings, their emotions, everything is expressed through their language. And once it dawned on to them that their language was about to disappear, they very much felt the need to try to stem this process of Kusunda becoming extinct. With the support of the Nepal Language Commission, then Uday started teaching Kusunda. And the first session was in February and March 2019, with a total of 20 students between 12 and 40 years old. 12 of them were school students whereas eight were adults literate in Nepali, and these students came from the three districts with the highest ethnic Kusunda population. The Nepal Language Commission provided the budget of 240,000 Nepal rupees, which is roughly equivalent to 1500 British pounds. And in this first session, both Gyanimaya and Kamala were the teachers and Uday facilitated the classes. And as can be seen in this picture in the previous picture, the setup was very simple, outside or in small huts. They had to sit on the floor and use was made, for example, of whiteboards. And this first session was kind of an introductory class, the students were introduced to the Kusunda language written in the Devonagari script. They were taught on basic Kusunda words and simple Kusunda sentences. Then the second session was supposed to be taught in early 2020. However, because of the spreading pandemic, this was postponed to the spring of 2021. And in that session, there were two separate groups. Again, because of pandemic concerns, one with 13 children in the grades four to 10 taught by Uday and one with eight literate adults taught by Kamala. And although 10 of the students actually attended the first session, 11 students were new. And that was because it was not possible to gather all the students together because of the pandemic. However, when the Delta variant arrived to Nepal from India, the classes were unfortunately cut short. The topics of the second class session went a bit further than the first session. It included parts of speech, it included different types of sentences, as well as an introduction to the possibility for creative writing. And the third session is planned for the coming winter. This is the Kusunda textbook that Uday wrote based on an example which is used by the Nepal Language Commission to teach endangered languages of Nepal, and the Language Commission printed it and then it was distributed to students. I was also trying to encourage students to use Kusunda in social media, for example in spoken voice messages, written voice messages, but also in creative writing songs, poems, prose, etc. And like I said before, perhaps it would be possible to translate some existing children's books or to develop some new children's books. And of course the main point would be that Kusunda people have to start speaking their language again. And because there are basically no adult speakers, except for Kamla, except for one. It really depends on this group of students of these children and adults who are learning the language to start using the language again in daily life. To their grandparents, their parents, but especially to their children. And if they are able to use it, then there is still a good chance that Kusunda has a future. If they don't, then because of the whole situation, the future looks kind of bleak. So Kusunda is not really in an enviable position. There's only a single speaker left. And despite all the good intentions, also the wishes of the Kusunda people, there's still every chance that the language may become extinct in the next decade or so. However, the good thing is that neither the Kusunda people nor the Nepal government through the Nepal Language Commission are going to sit idle and let it happen. A lot of things are going on like these Kusunda classes, like the documentation projects that will hopefully enable the Kusunda people and their language to have their language survive into the future. And hopefully this post-op that I'm working on will also contribute to these goals. And of course, any help will be appreciated. So we are planning to make our transcribed and translated texts available in open access, preferably also if we can interlinearize them, we will interlinearize them, parsing them, making them available for linguists, for academics, for researchers to work on and to contribute to the description of the Kusunda language. And we hope that it will not only remain limited to phonology or typology or grammatical features like the verbal paradigms or its phylogenetics status, but that people will also contribute in a positive way to enabling the revitalization efforts of the language. There's one idea that has been floated for quite some time, which is to resettle these scattered Kusunda communities in a contiguous area where they can then have access to forest resources also be given access to housing, be given access to health and sanitation to a school where they can learn Kusunda as well as Nepali, and this kind of a more clustered Kusunda settlement in order to not only contribute to the survival or the revitalization of the Kusunda language and culture, but also to uplift the socioeconomic status of all these scattered Kusunda communities or Kusunda families basically. So that's all from my side. I am very much interested to have comments suggestions from people practitioners in the field, people who know about Kusunda the situation in Nepal, and who could help us to to forward this project. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you, Tim. We already have some questions in the chat which I'll read out if you did write a question in the chat and want to participate feel free to unmute yourself and engage when I get to your question or comment. Just a reminder we are recording so if you do participate I assume you're giving consent to be recorded if that to be shared online. This is a question from Peter Austin is asking about whether there are any semi speakers is there no one who has partial knowledge or has learned something of it as a second language, because if they weren't that would be very unusual from a global perspective. Thank you for your question. There are a few elderly people like Prem Bahadur, maybe around five or six who remember a little bit Kusunda, they can remember some words but they are not able to make any consistent sentences. So, the reason that for example Kamala still knows her language is because her mother punitakuli was basically monolingual in Kusunda and she lived with her mother, and she used to talk Kusunda with her mother till her mother passed away a few years so she had that continued exposure to the language. For most other Kusunda from a very young age onwards they already started speaking in Nepali or in Kam or in Magar or some other Nepali language and as a result they lost their language quite rapidly even if they spoke it as a child. They didn't remember except for a few words and that has been the situation for Kusunda for the past decades basically and Gyanimaya she still remembered her language quite well and there are some people who say that the ones who stay in India. And they may also still remember their language because they are supposed to be two or three people who left Nepal together to work in and if I remember correctly it was Bhopal in India and because they stayed together they could still speak to each other in the Kusunda language. The problem has been that even if people grew up or were born and learned Kusunda when they were young, when they grew up, when they became teenagers, as soon as they married outside of the Kusunda family and they start living with people who spoke in Nepali or another language they just lost Kusunda and they had no one to talk to in Kusunda and as a result of that the language basically disappeared very rapidly. At the moment I don't, there are a few people who know a little bit Kusunda but I would not really want to call them semi speakers because their knowledge is so limited that it does not actually qualify as a semi speaker. There are also references a an article on this topic of last speaker in the chat which I can send you later to make sure you can pull up on that. I'll jump to a question though from VGA de Souza says thanks for the talk. Amazing work. How did you approach segmentation and Elon, and specifically in terms of training community linguists to recognize meaningful chunks. That's a very, that's a very tricky, tricky approach and that's still something that I'm, to be honest that I have to work on. And for now, the main segmentation so Uday has been working on the segmentation himself so he made the sentences himself I have made the segmentation in Elon again based on his earlier segmentation so there has been some adjustment here and there because indeed it is very difficult even for trained linguists to determine whether you should segment at phrases or whether it should be longer sentences and where to make those segment breaks and I have to be honest I don't think there is a kind of a one fits all in how to do that. And I think that that it is part also intuition. And if someone knows the language well enough, I think for them it's easier to actually make the segmentation then for people who do not, who are not speakers themselves or who do know or understand the language well enough yet. So it's, it's, it's a it's a very good issue, and it is something that I will also look in more when when when when like in the in the manual the segmentation part it is basically presumed as something autonomous something that is being done, but it is indeed something that could be looked into in more detail. There were a few comments and questions related to conversational data. So Julia seller bank mentions that she was very pleased to see a focus on conversational data. And Peter again had some questions about the use and the analysis of that data so he wrote since you recorded conversation have you adopted any aspects of a conversational analysis approach. There are examples and I think here he's referring to that the Elon annotations, don't tell us anything about interactional speech, and then he also made a comment wondering about the use of this conversational data in the language revitalization so it seems like from what you presented that there's a focus on literacy and less on the use of this conversational and interactional language that that people in recent literature including some work that he's done with truly I've pointed out that this conversational stuff may be more important for revitalization than literacy so whatever you can say about what you've done in terms of conversational analysis, and to that how have you incorporated that into the revitalization efforts. Thank you for your comments yeah comfort. Here I have to say that this is still very much at the inception phase so we have made those recordings in 2019. So we are working on the transcription translation and analysis, and that is still an ongoing process and indeed it is difficult to actually if you have multiple participants in a conversation with overlapping speech it is sometimes quite difficult to properly segment and annotate that in Elon. And what we try to do right now is in our transcription, make sure that everything is being transcribed in the, including, including the pauses the stills etc. But also make sure that markers that that that have not been described before are properly transcribed so that that they can be analyzed later on, and that is the good that is the advantage of having the video there as well. And the fact that you can actually play the video or play the recording and at the same time make the transcription that you can also see how people interact with each other in nonverbal communication. And this is, this is still ongoing, and we have finished now maybe 23 minutes of recording out of the total of two hours are now finished in transcription and translation. But out of these only maybe around three or four minutes have been completely annotated so it is still very much something, something ongoing, which has not been completed and we have not looked at at at how to incorporate different aspects of conversational analysis into into our into our actual annotation, etc. And the second question was about me. Yeah just how how does, or how maybe in the future do you think you might incorporate some of this conversational data into the revitalization efforts. Yeah. So at the moment. People who don't know any costunda have to learn costunda so at the moment it is very much about teaching them vocabulary teaching them simple sentences. And soon that's quite it's a pro normalizing language it's quite complex in that way. It is not something that people who know Nepali or people who know Magar, or people who know. Or another language are very familiar with. So for for from that aspect, right now the basis is very much on on teaching the basics. And once the students have the basics. And then the conversational part will come in in which they actually have to talk to each other so right now they're just asking each other. How are you what did you eat today and things like that and it is it is a very slow process also because many of these are students in schools so they don't have maybe on a 65 days a year in which they can be taught costunda. It is just a matter of one month maybe every winter, every year, and because of the pandemic even that hasn't been possible. So it's, it's, it's a very, it's a very small attempt that is being made at the moment, and you're definitely you're right if you want to teach people to a language so they use it in daily life again, all these aspects are extremely important. And we hope that that is also why we will make our data available for people to look at it from different perspectives people who are more expert in certain parts of certain linguistic topics will be able to help us to analyze it from a different perspective and come up with advice on, for example how to teach as well. Thanks to him. If anybody else has a question or comment feel free to use the raise hand function or is mentioned in the chat that you'd like to ask a question, or write out your question in the chat. Got a question here. I think it's from Jack, although the name doesn't show completely says thank you for the talk. I'm curious about the Cassunda communities attitude toward the revitalization of the language. Are they generally proactive. Are they aware of how being able to speak the language is linked to some aspects of their self identities. So yeah what what's been the attitudes and, and motivations from from the Cassunda side. The Cassunda themselves they they and that was the first thing that basically would I told me they want. They don't want to see their language disappear they now know that their language is about to disappear and they, they, they feel sad about that because they realize that that it is that their whole culture and and their language is basically encapsulated within that language. And, and they are very supportive of any attempt or any, any activity that promotes their language like the Cassunda welfare society in Nepal has been supporting any kind of project which aims at describing documenting describing and revitalizing Kusunda. So it's, it's very much something which comes from within the Cassunda community as well. And I think they they are a little bit aware of the difficulties that that are inherent to the fact that you try to revitalize language which is now only spoken by one person, but that does not really withhold them from from not supporting any attempts and they can't learn it all because I mean that that was someone recently also asked me like, okay, these students they are paid 100 Nepal rupees per day. So, are you sure that they are not just participating because they are getting paid for it. And I was like, okay, but you have to understand that also from a Nepali perspective in the winter holiday, when students are at home they're supposed to work together with their parents or they're being sent for some day labor or whatever. So there has to be some kind of a an incentive for for people to participate as well. And they don't participate plainly for the money they're very clear about that they're very enthusiastic in wanting to learn their language, and they understand that, especially the young ones but also the adults, they understand that that the future of their language basically now depends on them and their participation and their involvement and and and their continued involvement and their ability to revitalize the language and and pass it on to the next generation. Thanks. There any other final questions or comments otherwise I can follow up one more question from Peter Austin comments he also commented on language revitalization programs leave one in Poland that's focused on teenagers rather than adults or children and on programs in Australia that are focusing on incorporating semi speakers into revitalization. So you've seen from the dynamics of this community. Have you focused on different age groups or different groups in terms of their understanding of the, or how they remember the language and culture. Do you see different levels of engagement or ways to sort of leverage some some people's enthusiasm to help others or how might different groups within the consume to help each other in this, you know, revitalization process. It's a bit different situation from many other language communities because there are basically no semi speakers, and you basically start from scratch, in that only come now is there to teach her language she's the only one who remembers her language, and all the other kusuna people don't know the language and you have to start from nothing it's basically trying to revive an extinct language rather than revitalize a dying language. And, and from that perspective the approaches that that are taken maybe a little bit different from what you experience or see elsewhere on the age range of the participants in the kusuna classes is actually quite broad. And it is the eldest was I think 1440 and the youngest is 12 so they are like adults as well as as as as children school going children, and, and they have been taught sometimes together but in the last session they were also split up between the adults and the children that was actually mainly because of pandemic concerns, but on the other hand also it kind of facilitated the teaching process because the approach that you can take to adults and two children was different. And the one to teach the children, which was very much focused on teaching them, not just how to speak but also how to read and write so there was the focus on writing kusuna in Devan Agri, and the textbook also includes writing exercises not just speaking, whereas in the last session with the eight adults was much more about speaking. How do you say this how do you say this. So trying to get adults to interact with each other in the kusuna language. So there are these different approaches that are being taken and being tried out. And there are only around 150 kusuna people in Nepal and the majority of them are too busy in trying to survive on a daily basis to be involved in attending classes for one month. And, and that is where this idea of having this settled kusuna community comes in, where the kusuna can actually live together. The families that are now scattered in different parts of Nepal can live together they can have access to forest resources, they can have agricultural land they have a school where kusuna is taught etc. So that idea has been floating around but in in practicality of course it's it's not an easy thing to achieve. But for the in the case of kusuna, Uday and myself when we were discussing we were saying like okay maybe this is really a good approach because then you have people together and they can interact with each other. And in that way it's much easier to revitalize the language than that students come to learn kusuna for one month and then are expected to go back to their family which lives very in a very remote place from any other kusuna family, and then they're supposed to teach kusuna to their own family and come back again in the next year that that is a bit a difficult approach I think so that's why that idea of a kusuna settlement came up but for the time being that's not really materialized yet so. Yeah, we are we are running out of time but I did think of one more question I wanted to ask since you just use these words and I was wondering if you've had any reactions from kusuna people about metaphors of death and extinction in terms of you know their situation of their language, or even a framing Kamala as the last speaker is that language that's been used around kusuna speakers are they comfortable with it do you have any interactions from those kinds of metaphors. There have been several reports in the Nepali media, for example, last speaker of kusuna has died last speaker of kusuna has died there are no more kusuna. And because of that, Kamala for example is very much aware that she is now the last kusuna speaker. And she was very happy when she was introduced by David Waters and his team, when she was introduced to Gianni Maya, for example, because she had someone to talk to in kusuna after her mother Puneetakuri passed away. So, at that time, when we interviewed the two of them when we made the recordings of the two of them together, you could see that they were still very. They were happy for not being the last. And you can notice that Kamala now she is kind of. It's good that she speaks Nepali and that that she that she has her family etc to support her and that she meets with other kusuna people even though they don't speak her language. Yeah, you can see that that it's kind of, she's proud in a way but she is also quite sad because of the situation that that she is in. And, yeah, that's that's why we hope that that teaching kusuna to other kusuna people will will will give her it. And she's participating as well because she has this hope that it will lead to a situation where she won't be the last anymore and and the language won't die with her. So, have you had any interact or any reactions to the metaphors of language death or extinction. In kusuna there's not really. They don't really speak about it in that way. They don't, they don't. They don't express it in such in such ways we haven't really heard them use like it will die but just, there won't be anyone for me to talk to anymore that is how how she basically expresses the fear of the future situation. Good. Well, I think our hour is up so we'll stop there Tim I'll send you all of the text from the chat so you can follow up with any other questions or comments or references there so once again thank you to Tim and thank you everyone for participating. Okay, thank you very much everyone for attending thank you Joey for organizing.