Patrick Das
Hi! I’m Patrick Das, a fourth year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
I study how human history, geography, and cognition shape patterns of linguistic diversity. My research combines fieldwork, spatial analysis, and typological comparison to understand how languages change under contact, particularly in multilingual, politically complex regions. I’m especially interested in interdisciplinary methods, and integrating insights from allied fields such as anthropology, ecology and geography.
My dissertation focuses on Tikhir, a Trans-Himalayan language spoken in eastern Nagaland, India. Working closely with the Tikhir community, I document dialect variation, examine patterns of language shift, and explore how space and place have shaped the language. You can read more about this work here. This research is supported by a 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Some of my other research interests are:
- Linguistic areas, areality, and how we reason about ‘areal features’
- Noun classification and the semantic partitioning of these systems
- Modal reasoning in language (specifically counterfactual expressions)
- Definiteness cross-linguistically
Outside of linguistics, I enjoy playing chess, making coffee, or spending too much time on Football Manager.