I have an ongoing research interest related to Sindhi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of Pakistan and India. I have written several encyclopedia articles that provide a sketch of the grammar, history and sociolinguistic status of Sindhi. In 2000 I conducted field work among Sindhi speakers in Kachh (in Gujarat, India), collecting speech data for an acoustic phonetic study on consonants, vowels, and prosodic variation. Analysis of these data is currently underway. Click here for my encyclopedia articles on Sindhi.

During my visit to Kachh in the winter of 2000, I began work on the development of pedagogical materials for Sindhi, geared towards the English-speaking students. This work was done in collaboration with Vimmi Sadarangani of the Indian Institute for Sindhology (Adipur, Gujarat). In summer 2000, Ms. Sadarangani joined me at UIUC as co-instructor in a summer intensive course in Sindhi, offered for college credit. Since 2002 I have been working intermittently on a project to develop Sindhi Online, a web-based course for beginning-level Sindhi. This course is intended to cover the basic elements of Sindhi grammar, including pronunciation, word formation and sentence structure. The course also includes a tutorial on the Sindhi-Arabic script. Although Sindhi Online is still under development, the site is open to visitors and can be accessed here.

I have given a number of presentations to non-linguists on the status of Sindhi today, in Pakistan and the diaspora. These presentations highlight the role of language in establishing community and individual identity, and in the transmission of culture, and the emergence of an internet-based community of Sindhi language users. Click here for slides in pdf format from select presentations.