Prof. Dr. Suhnu Ram Sharma
Suhnu Ram Sharma (सुहनू राम शर्मा Suhnū Rām Sharmā) was born in 1947 in the Hamirpur Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh. He took his B.A. with honours in Sanskrit from Punjab University in Chandigarh in 1968, and he received his M.A. in Linguistics with gold medal in 1970. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation on the phonology of the Spiti language at Kurukshetra University in 1975. He taught Hindi to American Peace Corps from 1970 to 1973. He worked as a field linguist in the dialect survey of Haryana conducted by the Department of Linguistics at Kurukshetra. From 1974 to 1980, Dr. Sharma worked as a Research Associate in Linguistics of the Anthropological Survey of India in Calcutta. He conducted extensive fieldwork among the Wanchoo tribe in Arunachal Pradesh and on the Onge language on Little Andaman, For his linguistic traits survey, he worked on the tribal languages of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
In 1980, Sharma became a Reader in Tibeto-Burman Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics of Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute at Poona (Puṇe), where he taught post-graduate students in Tibeto-Burman linguistics, morphology, semantics and sociolinguistics. Sharma guided about half a dozen M.Phil. students and a dozen Ph.D. students. He became Professor of Tibeto-Burman Linguistics in 2004 at Deccan College at Puṇe. Prof. Sharma was also the Head of the Department of Linguistics at Deccan for from 1996 to 2004. Sharma managed the affairs of the Linguistic Society of India, headquartered in Puṇe, in the capacity of Secretary of the Society for the fifteen years from 1990 to 2005.
Professor Sharma retired from his teaching position as Professor of Tibeto-Burman Linguistics at Deccan College on 30 September 2006. However, he was subsequently formally re-appointed in the same position until April 2007. Professor Sharma conducted research at the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden as a Gonda Fellow from 1 May to 30 September 2007. During this period, he published his ‘Byangsi Grammar and Vocabulary’. He continues now to work toward the completion of his Manchad Grammar for the Himalayan Languages Project. Professor Sharma received a Senior Fellowship at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore in order to work on language contact and language change, being a case study of Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman contact in the western Himalayas. For this project, he became attached to the Northern Regional Language Centre of the Central Institute of Indian Languages at Patiala, when he returned to India in October 2007.
His major research has been on the so-called pronominalised Tibeto-Burman languages of western Himalayas, i.e. languages showing biactantial agreement for person and number in the verb. His book on Byangsi is the latest in the list of publications. He has published two books as a co-author, co-edited threes volumes and published about two dozen research articles and half a dozen book reviews in national and international journals. His forthcoming Grammar of Manchad will appear in the Brill series Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region.
Suhnu Ram Sharma is a native speaker of Kangri and is also fluent in Hindi, Panjabi and English. He also has a good working knowledge of Sanskrit, Tibetan, Esperanto, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and Nepali.
Selected publications
Sharma, Suhnu Ram. 2007. ‘The status of Bunan in the Tibeto-Burman family’, pp. 265-278 in Roland Bielmeier and Felix Haller, eds., Linguistics of the Himalayas and Beyond (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 196). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sharma, Suhnu Ram. 2007. Byangsi Grammar and Vocabulary. Puṇe: Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute.
Sharma, Suhnu Ram. [near completion]. A Grammar of Manchad (Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region). Brill: Leiden.