If I was to be offered a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of Nepali culture, I would investigate the commonalities between Nepali and the other languages in the same branch or family that Nepali belongs. This is more because I have been curious about this because when I hear some of the other languages like Hindi or Urdu, so many of the words are so similar but are different by a slight amount, word, or tonal change. Although I don't know the history of the languages going all the way back, I know that some of the similarities are because of how they were derived from. Throughout history, there has always been travel and intermingling across borders, even before the formation of the now-defined countries. The existence of trade has definitely made this even more significant because that pushed for more travel across the land and language accompanied throughout many civilizations and cultures.
In order to approach this research, I would first start out with exploring and discovering the emergence of Nepali as a language. There have been many cultures that shared the language and there is a reason why Nepali is the main language in Nepal, even though there are some older languages that existed before it. I want to explore how the many different villages, people, cultures chose to use Nepali as the common, national language as opposed to other languages. I want to explore the shared branches Nepali has with other Sanskrit languages and in history they branched away from each other to create the differences that exist today. I also want to explore the script and the writing system used by Nepali and the other languages I would compare to. For example, Nepali and Hindi are very very similar in terms of their writing, but Nepali and Urdu are very different. Although I have not explored this before, I assume it is due to the geographical and cultural significance of where Urdu emerged from.
The structural components in class are some of the things I want to explore. I would start off my exploring the phonemes, morphemes, syntax, context, etc. I know in Nepali they are significantly different and I want to add upon what I learned in class or researched for in class. I also want to explore more on the sentence structure that we discussed in the previous classes. Eventually I would move on to all the different type of sentence structures in Nepal (because I've tried reading some passages and I swear they are the size of a paragraph but all one sentence).
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