Nihali is a language isolate spoken in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in India by a small community of a few thousand ethnically Nihali speakers.
I started working on Nihali in 2020, originally aiming at external genetic comparison in order to uncover the language's closest relatives. This project has since taken a backseat to the much more involved task of internal reconstruction of Proto-Nihali and Pre-Proto-Nihali. So far, I've constructed an etymological database of the Nihali lexical items published in Nagaraja (2014), sorting the many, many loanwords found in the language by their most likely immediate donor. I aim to do the same with the varieties of Nihali documented by Asha Mundlay and F. B. J. Kuiper, then use that data to reconstruct Proto-Nihali and Pre-Proto-Nihali. A work-in-progress version of this database is included below, for those interested in the language:
I've made some progress in the reconstruction of Pre-Nihali phonology, but it's definitely yet to reach a publishable state. Some of my thoughts are included in the incomplete writeup below: