ELAP Alumni

Former MA student: Ross Perlin

Ross (left) with Dulong consultant and friend Mvng Jisong in Bingzhongluo (Yunnan)

It was Beijing, 2002: the last thing I expected while studying Chinese — the world's most spoken first language — was to become fascinated by the issue of endangered languages. The catalyst was a meeting with a jovial old Chinese linguist who had quietly dedicated his life to documenting and recording many of the country’s over 200 (completely non-Chinese) minority languages. I went on to complete a joint Bachelor's degree in Classics and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and an M.Phil. in Classics at Cambridge, all the while trying to fathom the global dimensions of language extinction and figure out what part I could play.

The answer came from the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP), where in 2006-07 I got my Master's in Language Documentation and Description while on a Marshall Scholarship from the British government. At SOAS, I gained a solid grounding in linguistics and an exciting introduction to cutting-edge practices in language documentation, preservation, revitalization, and archiving. My MA thesis on Dulong (Trung), a little-known Tibeto-Burman language of southwest China, laid the groundwork for three further years of field research on the language, supported by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and under the aegis of the Himalayan Languages Project, then at Leiden University and now based at the University of Bern. The results of my PhD fieldwork include dozens of hours of audio and video recordings of stories, songs, and conversations in Dulong and neighboring languages.

Whether filming storytellers, editing the first Dulong dictionary, or learning to speak Dulong myself, I have been applying what I learned at SOAS every day. My time at ELAP also inspired a deep and continuing activism around my own heritage language, Yiddish, which I now both speak and work in. I have had the chance to work with director Werner Herzog on an early-stage film project on endangered languages. Among other topics, I have written on issues of cultural and linguistic disappearance and preservation in the U.S., China, the former Soviet Union, and the Jewish diaspora for a range of publications, publishing my first book, Intern Nation in 2011.