Dr. Dörte Bochers
Dörte Borchers studied Social Anthropology, Classical Indology, modern Indian languages, Burmese Studies and related subjects at the Universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg. After taking an M.A. in Social Anthropology at the university of Heidelberg, she joined the Himalayan Languages Project in 1997 and completed a descriptive grammar of the Sunwar language (in Sunwar: Koĩc lo) spoken in eastern Nepal. While writing the grammar of Sunwar, Dörte conducted linguistic fieldwork on Burmese in Burma for a study on numeral classifiers.
Following her doctorate, Dörte began working on a descriptive grammar of the Surel language, spoken by about 25 persons in the village of Suri in the district of Dolakha eastern Nepal. Even though speakers of Surel and Sunwar are not in contact nowadays, the two languages show striking similarities. Her work is driven by her interest in grammar, linguistic typology, language documentation and language politics.
One of the first outcomes of her work on Surel and of the continuation of her research of Sunwar will be printed collections of narratives in the two languages that are accompanied by translations into Nepali and English as well as by audio CDs. The narratives focus on everyday life, life histories and religious and cultural traditions that the speakers would like to pass on to following generations. Dörte’s work on the collections of narratives is carried out with financial support of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (SOAS, London).
Selected publications
Borchers, Dörte. VS 2065 (late 2008). ‘सुरेलगाउंको सुरेलभाषा (The Surel language in the village of Suri)’, सिर्मी (Sirmī), 7 (6): 63.
Borchers, Dörte. 2008. A Grammar of Sunwar. Descriptive Grammar, Paradigms, Texts and Glossary (Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region 7). Leiden: Brill.
Borchers, Dörte. 2007. ‘Reasons for language death: myths and counter-evidence’, pp. 1-21 in Roland Bielmeier and Felix Haller, eds., Linguistics of the Himalayas and Beyond (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 196). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Borchers, Dörte 2006. ‘Dzongkha in Bhutan. Nationalsprache, Verkehrssprache, Literatursprache?’, pp. 45-57 in Ute Hüsken, Petra Kieffer-Pülz and Anne Peters, eds., Jaina-Itihasa-Ratna. Festschrift für Gustav Roth zum 90. Geburtstag. Marburg: Indica et Tibetica.
Borchers, Dörte. 2003. ‘Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachpolitik in Nepal’, Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 8: 25-37.
Borchers, Dörte 2003. ‘Sacred spaces in Sunwar houses’, pp. 71-84 in Michael Dieckhardt and Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, eds., Creating and Representing Sacred Spaces (Göttinger Beiträge zur Asienforschung 2-3). Göttingen: Peust und Gutschmidt Verlag.
Borchers, Dörte. 2002. [together with Sabira Ståhlberg] ‘Die mongolischen Schriften’, pp. 159-174 in Dörte Borchers, Frank Kammerzell and Stefan Weninger, eds., Hieroglyphen, Alphabete, Schriftreformen, Lingua Aegyptia - Studia Monographica 3. Göttingen: Seminar für Ägyptologie und Koptologie.
Borchers, Dörte. 1999. ‘Personalpronomina im Koits (Ostnepal)’, Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 2: 25-36.
Borchers, Dörte. 1996. ‘Richard Pischel’, pp. 731-732 in Harro Stammerjohann, ed., Lexicon Grammaticorum. Who's Who in the History of World Linguistics. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Borchers, Dörte 1994. ‘Minoritätensprachen in Indien seit der Unabhängigkeit. Ein Modell für ein mehrsprachiges Europa?’, pp. 83-102 in Uta Helfrich and Claudia Maria Riehl, eds., Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa - Hindernis oder Chance? (pro lingua 24). Wilhelmsfeld: Gottfried Egert Verlag.