Since Spring 2022, the CoRSAL team has been developing collections of legacy material contributed by three prominent Tibeto-Burman linguists: Robbins Burling (University of Michigan), Inga-Lill Hansson (Lund University), and James A. Matisoff (University of California, Berkeley).

The Robbins Burling Collection features digitized material created and collected by Dr. Burling over the course of his career. This collection spans various languages in Assam and Meghalaya including Garo, Rabha, Tiwa, Boro, and Dimasa in Burling’s handwritten fieldnotes, maps, pedagogical material, religious texts, and even video footage from the Garo Hills in the 1940s! Learn more about Burling’s life and career in this 2016 interview with Mark Post and Shobhana Chelliah.

The Akha Language Resource represents decades of documentation and analysis of the Akha language created by Inga-Lill Hansson from the 1970s onward. During the CoRSAL team’s 2022 visit to Dr. Hansson's home in Sweden to collect the analog materials, Hansson reminisced on her fieldwork experiences and shared her hopes for the future of her materials in a brief interview with Shobhana Chelliah. We also heard from Hansson's long-term family friend Mr. Søren Borch about his role in organizing and publicizing Hansson’s Akha documentation and the development of the Akha project group in Denmark and Sweden. Following our visit, the majority of Hansson’s primary Akha documentation has been digitized and archived, with more on the way. As of summer 2023, the collection includes photographs and audio recordings with corresponding translations and annotations in digitized notebooks including songs, traditional and personal narratives, and descriptions of daily life and Akha spiritual practices.

The James A. Matisoff Collection includes material from field methods courses offered at the University of California, Berkeley, and from Dr. Matisoff’s own fieldwork with the Lahu people in Thailand in the 1960s and 70s. See also the extensive text collection, Window onto a Vanished World: Lahu texts from Thailand in the 1960’s, includes accounts of daily life in a Lahu village, conversations, myths and traditional stories, humorous narratives, and descriptions of Lahu spirituality, and follow along with the audio in the collection.

We extend our thanks to these researchers and their families for making it possible to share these legacy collections with a wider audience, and look forward to developing these collections further. Stay tuned!