Mankiyali Language Resource

Part of CoRSAL

About this Collection

The materials in this collection are the outcome of a project directed by Dr. Sadaf Munshi, PhD., professor and chair for the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. The collection comprises recordings made by Dr. Munshi and her research team of language materials in Mankiyali (ISO 639-3 nlm), a highly endangered language belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family (Total number of speakers: approximately 500). Mankiyali is primarily spoken in two remote villages, viz. Danna and Dameka in the Oghi Tehsil of Mansehra District in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. Members of the speech community are also found in other nearby villages of Galdar and Arghanian, as well as in some urban centers of Pakistan such as Islamabad and Lahore. This information is based on personal communication with the members of the speech community as of June 2020.

The digital collection features audio and video recordings of texts and pedagogical materials; digitized copies of fieldwork notes; transcriptions, translations, and analyses of selected texts; and photographs documenting fieldwork and other events. The texts are in different genres, such as children's stories and mythical legends, historical accounts, personal narratives, natural conversations, poems, recipes, discussions on events or items of cultural importance, and discussions on linguistic data. Pedagogical materials include basic greetings and word lists such as numerals, body parts, kinship terms, color terms, birds and animals, fruits and vegetables, food items, household items, wooden and metal objects, agricultural terms, nature terms, etc.

Acknowledgements

This project was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation’s Documentation of Endangered Languages Program (2018).