Pema Geyleg

Pema Geyleg was born in 1979 at Thimphu. Pema Geyleg is a native speaker of Tshangla, also known as Sharchop. At the same time he has a firm command of Dzongkha and Mangdep. Pema Geyleg is also fluent in English, Nepali and Hindi. Pema Geyleg completed a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology at Sherubtse College in June 2004, and ever since he has been working on natural language processing. Until recently worked as head of the research unit of the Department of Information Technology of the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Royal Government of Bhutan. He is currently a visiting scholar assisting the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Project (THDL) at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

As a member of the research team of the Himalayan Languages Project in Leiden, Pema Geyleg is completing his doctoral dissertation on an analytical descriptive grammar of modern Dzongkha. Pema Geyleg will attempt to go beyond the Dzongkha grammar written by Karma Tshering and George van Driem and write the first comprehensive grammar that will also be integrated directly into the internet with numerous natural language processing applications for internet users. Most daringly, his study will include a detailed proposal for an orthographic reform of the language, which he plans to submit to the Royal Government of Bhutan.