The Himalayan Languages Project, launched in 1993, is a research collective based at Leiden University and comprising much of the world's authoritative research on the lesser-known and endangered languages of the Himalayas, in Nepal, China, Bhutan, and India. Its members regularly spend months or years at a time doing field research with native speakers. The Director of the Himalayan Languages Project is George van Driem. Project members include Mark Turin and Jeroen Wiedenhof. The project recruits graduate students to collect field data on little-known languages for their Ph.D. dissertations.
The Himalayan Languages Project was officially commissioned by the government of Bhutan to devise a standard romanization of Dzongkha.
Since George van Driem's move to the University of Bern, many members of the Himalayan Languages Project are now based out of Switzerland.
Languages studied
The project has completed comprehensive grammars of the following languages:
Members of the Himalayan Languages Project also regularly organise the Himalayan Languages Symposium, an annual conference on Trans-Himalayan languages.[1][2] Conferences have been held annually since 1995.
^"Conference schedule". Himalayan Languages Symposium. 2021-04-14. Retrieved 2024-01-20.
^"Co-located Conferences". Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute: July 7-August 8, 2025 at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. Retrieved 2024-12-18.