Southeast Asia is the home of high levels of social diversity, including cultural and linguistic. Many of the languages of Asia have not been described, nor do we have a good understanding of how multilingualism functions in Southeast Asian societies. In my research in the border areas of northern Laos, I am doing linguistic documentation as well as collection and analysis of oral literature and other forms of linguistic performance. This documentation and description work is framed in a larger ethnography of multilingualism.

Expressives, or ideophones as they are known in other regions, lie somewhere between grammar and poetry, and thus by definition require multidisciplinary approaches to research. Southeast Asia and South Asia both have rich areas of expressive language, which is closely related to not only culture and knowledge systems, but is also an area of performance in daily life that has not received much attention. This research builds upon work in languages of the upland areas of Laos, Thailand and China, and is informed by exchange and comparative analysis with researchers from South Asia.

Rapid socio-economic change transformation of rural areas continues to place pressure on the transmission of knowledge systems across the globe. The uplands of Southeast Asia are characterized by high degrees of geographic overlap in areas of biological and linguistic diversity. Indigenous knowledge – encoded in local languages – is central to efforts to stem the loss of biocultural diversity globally. In Laos, most of these languages have speaker populations in the thousands and are transmitted entirely through oral culture. With the increasing penetration of the national education system and promotion of industrial agriculture, the resilience of local language and ecological knowledge are under unprecedented pressure. This work a) explores flora, fauna landscape forms, and geohistory, b) integrates folklore to analyze cultural framing of interspecies relations, and c) frames knowledge systems within local narratives of socio-ecological change.