Description
The north of Myanmar has been shaken both by raging civil war and the recent, devastating earthquake. The multilingual Kachin people inhabit the north of the country and also live across the border in southern Yunnan, China. Their main language is Jinghpaw (aka Jingpo), a Tibeto-Burman language largely unknown among polyglots and most linguists. For my PhD thesis, I explored the topic of language contact in that region and learned to speak the language. In this talk I want to present the orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax of Jinghpaw to give an impression of how the language works. And you will hear how I managed to learn the language without any textbooks, courses or Duolingo.
André Müller holds a PhD in comparative linguistics and has been working with languages from the Caucasus (Tsez, Dargi), Southeast Asia (Jinghpaw, Lhaovo) and North America (Dënë Sųłınë́). At the moment he teaches German as a second language in Leipzig. His interest includes language learning (of course), typology, grammatical structures, phonetics, constructed and extinct languages.
This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering 2025: https://www.polyglotgathering.com.