Dripta Piplai (Mondal) did her PhD from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Linguistics, University of Delhi, in 2015. She joined as an assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 2018.
She primarily works in the domain of language in education. She worked with the children of several communities of India in the last few years, including Rajbanshi, Mundari, Koda, Oraon, Toto, Mahato Bhasha, and Tea-Garden Sadri. She is also working on Kasaragod Malayalam, Jharkhand Sadri, Kokborok and Nagamese at IIT KGP.
Her primary aim is to use the morphosyntactic as well as sociolinguistic analysis of child language data to create materials for classroom use. She believes that the data can also help teachers understand the issues of language conflict in early literacy and elementary education. Her current research focuses on hybrid languages in two selected multilingual areas of rural West Bengal, India. It includes the analysis of agreement in the hybrid varieties and sensitising the teacher-educators to use the varieties for multilingual pedagogic intervention.
Dripta is also interested in ethnomusicology and language vitality from the viewpoint of endangered language research. Another area of her interest is the discourse surrounding the practice and performance of Tagore songs, which stems from her formal training in these songs since childhood.
She is a busy mother of a busy child. She loves to travel, listen to music, sing, and read.
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A hybrid language mosaic in multilingual Eastern India by Piplai D. International Journal of Multilingualism - (2025)
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Unravelling the potential emergence of a fused lect: Analysing the Northern Kasaragod Variety of Malayalam using the exoskeletal frame model by Santh R., Piplai D. Linguistic Variation - (2025)
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Shaping the status of indigenous languages through policy: Kurukh in Bengal by Sultana A., Piplai D., Roy I. Current Issues in Language Planning - (2025)
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New linguistic hierarchy in nineteenth-century Bengal and education for Muslims by Chisti S., (mondal) D. P. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 47 1111-1129 (2024)
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Decolonisation in Language Education: Addressing the question of heterogeneity in West Bengal and Kerala in the 1990s by Rekha L., Chisti S. , Arjunan A. N., (mondal) D. P. Postcolonial Direction in Education 13 370-408 (2025)
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
Co-Principal Investigator
- SPICMACAY IIT Kharagpur IIT KHARAGPUR
Ph. D. Students
Akanksha Tirkey
Area of Research: Vitality of Kurukh language
Anushkha Saha
Area of Research: Language maintenance and shift
Atrayee Mukherjee
Area of Research: Language variation in classroom
Lekshmi R
Area of Research: Language Policy and Classroom
Nilanjana Saha
Area of Research: Diasporic literature
Prakriti Chakraborti
Area of Research: Mother tongue-based multilingual education
Ritu Santh
Area of Research: Morpho-Syntactic development of the children with language disorder
Shivam Goswami
Area of Research: Crime Fiction
Somrita Banerjee
Area of Research: Multilingualism and langauge policy
