Patrick Das

Patrick Das

he/they

A linguist interested in contact, cognition and typology

Research

Research Projects

Below, I discuss my current research projects in vague order of active interest.

Dissertation

Dimensions of Variation in Tikhir, a Language of Eastern Nagaland

My dissertation investigates patterns of linguistic variation and change in Tikhir, a previously undocumented Trans-Himalayan language spoken in Eastern Nagaland, within the broader Eastern Himalayan Region. Drawing on original fieldwork, I examine how variation emerges across speakers, communities, and linguistic domains in a highly multilingual setting shaped by long-standing contact and mobility. This project investigates:

Beyond its theoretical contributions to sociolinguistics and linguistic typology, this work also aims to support ongoing documentation and community-driven language initiatives, including the development of lexical resources and educational materials for Tikhir speakers.

This work is supported by a 2025 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

Areal Features and Language Contact

For much of human history, languages have been in contact. However, we still lack a good understanding of exactly how languages interact and change each other when in contact, given the variety of social contexts that can mediate them. The effects of language contact vary with regards to domains as well, as some claim that certain domains are unassailable by contact, while others hold the position that everything is subject to change via language contact (Thomason, 2001)

Linguistic areas are an aspect of language contact that are still not well understood - they are, essentially, the claim that languages in an area have had such prolonged contact that they resemble each other in a number of features. This is, theoretically, a simple concept, but starts to break down when one considers the details, such as: how different should the lineages of the languages in the area be, to constitute change due to contact? How many traits do they need to have in common? and most importantly, how do we determine that the similarity in trait is truly due to contact, and not inheritance or universal preference?

In my work, I take some steps towards problematizing areal features, the unit on which claims of areality for linguistic areas are made. I develop and suggest the contact correspondence hypothesis: that for a linguistic trait to be considered an areal feature between two languages of an area, it must be absent in its two closest relatives that lie outside the area. On applying the contact correspondence hypothesis to numeral classifiers, I find that there is no evidence for an areal diffusion story in the Eastern Himalayan Region, counter to claims in the literature, and that instead there are genealogical signals in the structure that lie far outside the region. I plan on following this work with a meta-review on how areal features are suggested and tested.

Relevant work:

Multilingualism and Language Change

A central theme in my research is trying to understand how the repertoires of multilingual speakers can inform us about language change and linguistic typology, given that multilingual speakers are the norm, not the exception. However, our scientific understanding of both is heavily skewed towards non-representative, large, official and literate languages.

Additionally, the type of multilingualism that is common for the majority of the world (grassroots multilingualism), is not the type that is well understood (Ortega, 2019). Further still, there is tremendous variation in these ‘small-scale’ multilingual contexts that still requires further research, and our opportunities to document them are disappearing due to the rapid impact of globalization and colonization.

I am interested in furthering our understanding of language ecologies (how do languages co-exist in an interconnected, multilingual system?), problematizing the concept of the native speaker in typology research, and creating better models of language contact that incorporate grassroots multilingualism.

Historical Linguistics and Language Evolution

Our understanding of ‘what is borrowed’ in language (under influence from other languages) is impossible without an understanding of what is conserved. Unfortunately, for many languages of the Eastern Himalayan Region, the primary foci of my research, this work is still not done due to lack of good quality, primary linguistic data on many of these languages. Together with Kellen Parker van Dam, I am working on a project that aims to clarify the phylogeny at the lower branches of the Trans-Himalayan language family, starting with Central Naga, the branch that Tikhir is in.

I am also interested in the coevolutionary processes that lead to the development of specific traits in languages. In a project with my adviser Hannah Haynie and Grace Ephraums, I am investigating the coevolution of case-marking in Australian languages, a language family known for its diversity in nominal case marking.

Manuscripts and Papers

Conference Presentations

Invited Talks

Roundtable Discussions