SOAS academic awarded £733,597 AHRC grant to complete four-year project studying the ...

1 October 2021

Dr Nathan Hill, Reader in Tibetan and Historical Linguistics, based in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, together with Dr Marieke Meelen of Cambridge Univiersity, have been awarded a £733,597 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), to complete a four-year project studying the historical grammar of Tibetan and Newar. Newar is the indigenous language of the Kathmandu valley, Nepal’s main population centre.

The project, titled “The Emergence of Egophoricity: a diachronic investigation into the marking of the conscious self”, will examine the origin and development of an intriguing phenomenon of these two languages known as ‘egophoricity’, typically defined as when first person statements and second person questions in the same way. Although these two Himalayan languages have been very important in the study of egophoricty, the history of how these languages developed this pattern have never before been examined in detail.

For further information, contact:

Nathan Hill – nh36@soas.ac.uk