I have special interest in the features of minor and endangered languages of India. I have been involved in documenting and describing various minor languages of West Bengal since last six years. Some of them are Dhimal, Mahali, Toto, Kurmali etc. I have helped in building corpus and creating digital dictionaries for some of these languages. I am interested in developing tools for the minor languages of India as these languages are often less-resourced and hence lesser used than the major languages of the country which adds to the vulnerability of the language. I also study ethno-linguistic features of the languages which bring out amazing facts about languages and the related cultures.
Studying contact induced languages in the languages is also one of my research areas. The contact induced changes become more fascinating for me when the languages belong to different language families. Like, one of my studies explores the effect of Indo-Aryan language on a minor Tibeto-Burman language.

I have some works on applied linguistics where I have tried to locate the problems of second language learning. One of such studies reports, an investigation of English spelling errors by the students of native Hindi speakers. English spelling error is a very common problem of our country where Hindi is a major language and most of the school education is done through English medium. Many interesting facts are revealed in the study.

I am also interested in typology. I explored noun cases of seven Eastern Indo-Aryan (EIA) languages for my Ph.D. It was an intra-genetic work based on primary data. Cognitive Framework was used to describe the cases. Cases in EIA languages show dense polysemous network, which has been justified in the study.

All Publications

The case system of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages: A typological overview by Lahiri B. The Case System of Eastern Indo-Aryan Languages: A Typological Overview 1-165 (2021)
Relation between animacy and case marking in Eastern Indo-Aryan languages by Lahiri B. Trends in South Asian Linguistics 173-190 (2021)
Kurmali: A Language of undivided Bihar by Lahiri B. Linguistic Ecology of Bihar 150-155 (2019)
Effect of Bangla on Koda Verbs by Lahiri B. Queries in Structure of Language 131-137 (2020)
Aggressive and Offensive Language Identification in Hindi, Bangla, and English: A Comparative Study by Kumar R., Lahiri B. , Ojha A. K. SN Computer Science 2, 26 - (2021)

Completed Projects

Co-Principal Investigator

Language shift, multilingualism and cultural continuity among the Jarawas of the Andaman islands: Documentation and digital archiving of oral traditions Indian Council of Social Science Research

Alumni members