Shobhana Chelliah

rdf:langString Shobhana Chelliah

rdf:langString Shobhana Chelliah

rdf:langString Shobhana Chelliah

rdf:langString St. Stephen's College

rdf:langString Linguistics, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Language documentation

rdf:langString Shobhana Chelliah is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas.  Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India. She was a Program Director for the US National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program from 2012-2015. She is currently partnering with individuals and academic institutions in India to create a state-of-the-art archive for the long term preservation and access of language documentation materials. This archive, the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages, is housed at the University of North Texas Digital Library. Chelliah’s 2022 Fulbright-Nehru fellowship is dedicated to development of these partnerships. Her publications include A Grammar of Meithei (Mouton 1997) and The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork (Springer 2011) as well as articles on Tibeto-Burman differential case marking and language contact, many of which she has co-authored with her students. She is working with Political Scientists James Meernik and Kimi King to create interdisciplinary frameworks to understand threats to language vitality. With health information expert Sara Champlain and phonologist Kelly Berkson, she is working to bring culturally-framed COVID information to underserved populations in the United States. With computational linguist, Alexis Palmer, she is working on discovering differential marking patterns through cross language comparison. These three projects are funded by the National Science Foundation.