Khumi Chin

Justin Watkins, SOAS

Project Summary:

Khumi Chin is the variety of Southern Chin (Tibeto-Burman) spoken in and around Paletwa in the southern tip of Chin State in western Burma (Myanmar), and across the border in adjacent Bangladesh. It currently has roughly 70,000 speakers but is changing fast under the influence of both Arakanese (Rakhine) and Burmese.

The Khumi Chin Dictionary project is a collaboration between the Yangon-based Khumi Literacy Committee, a dedicated and determined group of Khumi speakers who are passionate about improving and maintaining the written form of their language, and Dr Justin Watkins, Lecturer in Burmese/Myanmar at SOAS.

The project has received partial funding from SOAS.

Ongoing project description:

The project has collected texts and transcribed recordings of Khumi and a lexical database is being compiled in order to produce a Khumi-Burmese-English dictionary. The text corpus used for the dictionary will also provide material for further descriptive work.