Sylheti Project

The Sylheti Project was founded by Dr Candide Simard (Linguistics department, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London) after an invitation from the director of the Surma Community Centre, Camden, during Endangered Languages Week in 2012. Since then, SOAS linguistics students have participated in this extracurricular project to document, describe, and raise awareness of the *Sylheti language as it is spoken by users of the Surma Centre. Students in the Fieldmethods course have worked with Sylheti speakers to document and describe Sylheti grammar. Alongside other sub-projects, the Sylheti Project has compiled a dictionary for an app, produced a storybook, and held an academic conference. In order to involve Sylheti-speaking SOAS students (and Sylheti-speaking Londoners), the SOAS Sylheti Language Society is a group for collaborative teaching and learning to give a different analytic forum to Sylheti to be discussed as a language, not 'improper Bengali' (as it's called in most Bengali language courses where in London 6-8 out of 10 students are Sylheti origin). Teaching Sylheti is also an experience to put on a C.V. which may lead to translation/interpretation work here in the U.K. SOAS society regulations say the 30% can be outside non-student participants, so please join if you're interested ! The SOAS Sylheti Language Society produced a lessons booklet and is working on expanding its second edition. This project has evolved beyond SOAS linguistics students and flourishes with the contributions of all language enthusiates. *Sylheti is an Indo-Aryan language with non-Indic, like Tibeto-Burman, influences, on the Bengali-Assamese language continuum. It is spoken by a minority in north-east Bangladesh and south Assam, India, where it is often considered to be a 'dialect' of Bengali. However, it is a language, with an estimated 400 000 speakers in