Narayan Sharma

PhD Student

Narayan did his undergraduate studies in Education, follwed by an MA in English literature. During his postgraduate training at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, he became interested to an MA in the Linguistic Department as well. Consequently, he wrote his both MA theses on Thakali, a Tibeto-Burman minority language of Nepal, entitled ‘Clause Structures in Thakali’ and ‘Thakali NP in X-bar Syntax’.

In 2003, while teaching part-time in the Linguistics Department and editing the ‘Gurung-Nepali-English’ Dictionary, he was invited to work as a Research Assistant with Prof. Balthasar Bickel on the Volkswagen Foundation funded DOBES project ‘The Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP)’. He spent more than five years at CPDP, taking responsibility for grammar and lexicon sections in the Puma language. He worked also as a translator for the DFID-funded project Nepal Safer Motherhood Project, Search for Common Ground (SFCG) and New York University.

Narayan's core interests include morphology, syntax, typology, and language endangerment and documentation. He is very eager to learn new technologies and theories in linguistics as well. He has published about half a dozen articles in national and international journals. He has extensive fieldwork experience, not only in linguistics but also in developmental projects. Audio-visual recording, use of Toolbox, ELAN, IMDI, and FileMaker are among his technology skills.

Narayan started his MPhil at SOAS in September 2009 to work on the morpho-syntax of Puma (which has highly complex verbal morphology) under the supervision of Prof. Peter K. Austin. He was awarded an Overseas Research Student Award, for three years, an Endangered Language Academic Programme Bursary for one year, and an Endangered Language Documentation Programme Individual Graduate Scholarship for three years.