Dr. Heleen Plaisier
Heleen Plaisier is the world’s leading non-Lepcha authority on Lepcha. Heleen is dedicated to the study of the Lepcha language and culture.
Heleen has completed both a grammar of Lepcha and a catalogue of the world’s largest collection of Lepcha manuscripts, which by accident of history happens to be kept at the Leiden University Library. She is currently completing an analytical edition of a native 19th-century Lepcha dictionary.
Heleen currently continues her Himalayan linguistic and cultural research at Leiden University, where she also helps to run the F.B.J. Kuiperinstituut. This institute coordinates the curricula and training programmes of Slavic languages, African Languages, native America, Indo-European and comparative linguistics.
Selected publications
Plaisier, Heleen. 2007. A Grammar of Lepcha (Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region 7). Leiden: Koninklijke Brill.
Plaisier, Heleen. 2006. A Grammar of Lepcha. Universiteit Leiden: doctoral dissertation.
Plaisier, Heleen. 2005. ‘A brief introduction to Lepcha orthography and literature’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 41 (1): 7-24.
Plaisier, Heleen. 2003 b. Catalogue of Lepcha Manuscripts in the van Manen Collection (Kern Institute Miscellanea 11). Leiden: Institute Kern.
Plaisier, Heleen. 2003 a. ‘Lepcha’, pp. 705-716 in Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, eds., The Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge.