Shobhana Chelliah is an Indian-American linguist who specializes in Sino-Tibetan languages. As of 2023, she is a professor of linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington.[3] Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languagesofNortheast India.
Shobhana Chelliah
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|---|---|
| Born | |
| Nationality | United States of America |
| Known for | Documentation of the Meitei, Manipuri, and Lamkang languages |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Texas (PhD) University of Delhi (AM) St. Stephen's College (AB)[1] |
| Doctoral advisor | Anthony C. Woodbury |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguistics |
| Sub-discipline | Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Language documentation, Morphosyntax, Corpus linguistics[2] |
| Institutions |
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Chelliah received her PhD in 1992 from the University of Texas, Austin, with a dissertation entitled, A study of Manipuri grammar.[4] She joined the faculty of the University of North Texas (UNT) in 1996, where she held the positions of Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information until 2022.[5] In 2020, she received the UNT Distinguished Research Professor Award.[6]
Her publications include A Grammar of Meithei (Mouton 1997) and The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork (Springer 2011) as well as articles on Tibeto-Burman differential case marking and language contact, many of which she has co-authored with her students.[7]
She has partnered with individuals and academic institutions in India to create a state-of-the-art archive for the long term preservation and access of language documentation materials. This archive, the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages, is housed at the University of North Texas Digital Library.[8] The project was partially funded by a 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.[9]
Her research has been supported by a number of NSF grants. She is working with Political Scientists James Meernik and Kimi King to create interdisciplinary frameworks to understand threats to language vitality.[10] With health information expert Sara Champlain and phonologist Kelly Berkson, she is working to bring culturally-sensitive COVID information to underserved populations in the United States.[11] With computational linguist, Alexis Palmer, she is working on discovering differential marking patterns through cross language comparison.[12]
Chelliah was a Program Director for the US National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program from 2012-2015.[13][14]