Lamjung Yolmo now in Ethnologue!
I often tell people that I accidentally started working on Lamjung Yolmo for my PhD. I had initially intended to work on Kagate (and eventually have started a project with its speakers), and in initial conversations was told by the people I work with that was the name of their language. I’ll save the story of language-name complexity for another day, but the upshot was that I ended up focusing on a variety of Yolmo spoken in Lamjung that had never been discussed in the literature before.
It’s been really interesting to discover how different it is to the previously documented varieties, and also to see people who know Nepal’s language landscape be surprised when you tell them there are half a dozen villages of Yolmo speakers 200km from where anyone expected them to be.
In 2013 there has been a revision of Ethnologue - the most comprehensive listing of all known languages - and Lamjung Yolmo has been added in the list of known Yolmo dialects. This is a nice step towards better recognition of the Yolmo people of Lamjung and their language. It was also nice that it happened just before my completion talk, so I could tell everyone who was there!
