Priyankoo Sarmah

I am Priyankoo, a Professor of Linguistics at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G), India. I studied linguistics and earned my M.A. and M.Phil. from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India. I completed my Ph.D. from the University of Florida, USA, on tones in Rabha and Dimasa, two Tibet-Burman tone languages spoken in North East India. Before joining IIT-G, I worked at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea, teaching undergrad and grad students phonetics and phonology.

After joining IIT-G in 2011, I have been working on the phonetics of tones and vowels of several North-East Indian languages. I have been interested in the acoustic properties of tones, perception of tones, and statistical modeling of tones. Over the years, I have also ventured into the domain of speech technology development for resource-poor languages and have worked on speech recognition, automatic language, and dialect identification. An in-depth understanding of the acoustic characteristics of speech enables one to build better language technologies for resource-poor languages. At the same time, I believe that using machine learning techniques in speech helps us uncover new speech features in these languages.

I am glad that the Digital Language Typology project was born out of the passion for speech studies that I shared with Juraj and Daniil. It is also heartening to see several students from Helsinki and Guwahati working together on this project! Let’s keep moving ahead!