Kusunda is a critically endangered language isolate spoken in the hills of Central and Mid-Western Nepal.
For most of its history, Kusunda has been critically underdocumented. A short, 269-entry Kusunda wordlist was recorded in 1848 by an assistant of Brian Houghton Hodgson, the British Resident in Kathmandu and an amateur naturalist and ethnographer. After that, no other data on Kusunda was collected until 1970. There was another 36-year gap where no more information on Kusunda was published, and the language was thought to have died out.
In 2004, an unbelievable stroke of luck saw two fluent speakers of Kusunda, Kamala Khatri and Gyani Maiya Sen, make contact with linguists while they were in Kathmandu getting their personal identity records sorted. Extensive elicitation with these informants was conducted, resulting in the very first sketch grammar of the language, which was published by Himalayan Linguistics in 2006. Since then, these indefatigable informants have worked on several projects with linguists from Nepal and abroad, and our knowledge of Kusunda has increased in leaps and bounds.
I started working on Kusunda in 2020, during the first year of my undergrad degree. My main research interest at the time was historical -- how did this language isolate come to be spoken in Nepal? What kind of contact has it had with other languages of the Himalayan fringe and South Asia in general? What did earlier stages of Kusunda look like, from a phonological, morphological, and lexical perspective? Since then, my preoccupation with the historical linguistics of Kusunda has remained, complemented by a growing interest in aspects of the synchronic language as it's spoken right now.
As is normal for me when working on the historical phonology of an underdocumented language, I started by creating an etymological database of Kusunda lexical data available in existing published sources. For those interested in the language, I've included a Google Drive link below:
My work on Proto-Kusunda reconstruction has mostly focused on Proto-Kusunda phonology. I have a working draft of a segmental reconstruction, which I plan to submit for publication once it's been edited a bit and brought in line with my more recent work on the language:
A reconstruction of Proto-Kusunda segmental phonology (pre-submission draft)
Proto-Kusunda morphology is the subject of my first published paper, "Possessive prefixes in Proto-Kusunda," set to appear in an upcoming issue of Himalayan Linguistics:
Possessive prefixes in Proto-Kusunda
In the future, I plan to dig further into the historical phonology of Kusunda. Loanword analysis appears to be a very promising direction for this research at this point, as a significant amount of Kusunda vocabulary is borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Trans-Himalayan. This will act as the primary source of evidence for reconstructing the phonology of Pre-Proto-Kusunda, the stage of the language preceding the Proto-Kusunda I reconstruct.
I've also written several school research papers on synchronic aspects of Kusunda grammar, which could serve as the germ of future projects:
The second of these, which I submitted as my Honours dissertation at the University of Edinburgh, explores a very theoretically interesting morphological system in Kusunda, that of specificity. To simplify a quite complicated story, it appears that Kusunda marks verbs for the referential category of specificity, which is ordinarily only associated with nominal referring expressions. In this, as well as a number of other things, Kusunda is unique among the languages of the world.
The future of Kusunda, like that of so many other minority and indigenous languages worldwide, is uncertain. After the death of Gyani Maiya Sen in 2020, there is only one fluent speaker remaining, though revitalization efforts are underway in Nepal to teach young Kusundas their language. Documentation, description, and support for the Kusunda community are vital at this critical time.