SEALS 2014: Asian language specialists meet in Myanmar

SIL's John Eppele presents research at SEALS 2014, which was hosted on the campus of Yangon University.

(June 2014) The 24th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS) was held 28-31 May on the campus of Yangon University, Myanmar. Held annually for the past twenty-four years, SEALS is one of the most significant conferences focused on Asian languages. This was the first time that the event was hosted in Myanmar.

The SEALS conference features presentations on a wide variety of topics related to Southeast Asian languages, such as those in the AustronesianAustro-Asiatic, Hmong-Mien, Tibeto-Burman and Tai-Kadai language families. SIL linguists and a number of colleagues from Payap University (Thailand) were among those presenting research at SEALS 2014.

SIL presentations included:

  • Lisa Cooper and Beau Cooper: “Approximant or fricative? Articulatory strength variation of Myanmar (Burmese) /j/”
  • John Eppele: “Ethnologue: Languages of Nepal. A pragmatic overview”
  • Kirk Person: “Emerging models of language policy in Southeast Asia: Implications for ethnic minority communities”
  • Helga So-Hartmann: “Properties of the verb complex in Lemi”
     

Tim Armstrong, SIL’s Associate Director for Technology in Southeast Asia, led a workshop which provided training for the use of the FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) software. FLEx was designed to streamline the process of organizing and analyzing language data for a variety of research and language development tasks.

The next SEALS conference will be hosted by Payap University in Chiangmai, Thailand,  in May 2015.



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