Himalayan Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics and NLP have many obvious applications for researchers, academics, and other specialists; what should not be overlooked, however, is their role in improving the mundane, everyday interactions between people and language, be they a reader of a newspaper; a child with a storybook; or a student in a classroom. The language analyses that these linguistic tools provide have an important part to play in the feedback loop between authors, journalists, and pedagogists on the one hand and their audiences and students on the other.

While these sorts of research-based resources have already made splashes in majority languages like English, their ripples have yet to spill over into the smaller language markets. Within this paper we outline the ways in which corpus linguistics may inform Tibetan language literacy and education in both L1 & L2 contexts, while drawing from our own research into issues of readability and the development of a modern pedagogy for instruction in the Tibetan alphabet based on frequency data.