It is hard to believe that it has been 40 years since I first heard about the divergent Newar dialect spoken in Dolakha, and 39 since my first trip to Nepal and my momentous meeting with Mr. Amar Kumar Pradhan, his family, Kalpana Shrestha, and so many others who have helped and supported me over the decades. I hope that my publications and documentary materials have gone a small way towards expressing my respect and gratitude.
Current and future projects include:
- Compiling all of my materials on the language for deposit into the PARADISEC archive, cross listed with Archive Nepal. These include: all of my texts regularized, prosodically transcribed, and translated into Nepali, with versions in PDF, ELAN, and FLEx; all sound files; the Misāmi videos; lexical files; PDFs of all my notebooks; and legacy fieldnotes from Alfons Weidert.
- Publishing a trilingual version of my glossed and analyzed texts. I would like to choose some of the stories to convert into children’s books.
- Working with the community to produce video documentation of important cultural practices.
- Writing a grammar that people without a PhD in linguistics can understand.