This 3-year project (2017-2020) was a fieldwork-based study of the Nam Noy Valley situation in central upland Laos, where three minority languages (Saek, Kri, and Brou) are spoken in close proximity. The project’s aims were to document the three languages, investigate their degree of convergence, and analyze the ecology and social dynamics around these languages. (The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant AUD 639k Do Language Boundaries Stabilize Ethnic Boundaries? DP170104607, with collaborators U. Ansaldo, P. Pittayaporn, and S. Matthews.)

The project has so far produced two new reference grammars of languages that have never been described to modern standards: one of the Saek language by Dr. Weijian Meng and one of the Bru language by Dr. Angus Wheeler. In addition, team members (Enfield, Meng, Wheeler, and Dr. Charles H. P. Zuckerman) carried out research on sociolinguistic and anthropological aspects of the Nam Noy situation. These and a sample of other publications are listed below.

Sample publications arising from the project

Enfield, N. J., Jack Sidnell, Charles H. P. Zuckerman (Eds.) 2020. Studies in the Anthropology of Language in Mainland Southeast Asia. Special issue of the Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. (Published 8 May 2020: http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52466)

Enfield, N. J. (2026). Legibility and agency. American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70041

Enfield, N. J. (2025). Legibility in culture. Anthropological Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996251338486

Enfield, N. J., and Charles H. P. Zuckerman. 2024. Moorings: Linguistic Practices and the Tethering of Action, Status, and Experience. Current Anthropology 65, no. 3: 554–76. https://doi.org/10.1086/730187

Enfield, N. J. 2023. Flow piracy and percolation in a hydropower watershed: Interceptions of Indigenous languages in upland Laos. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2023.2265957

Zuckerman, Charles H. P. and N. J. Enfield. 2023. The limits of thematization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12399

Zuckerman, Charles H. P. and Enfield, N. J. 2022. The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Kri: House Construction and Ethnolinguistic Transformation in Upland Laos. Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute. 28.1, 178-203. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.13657SUPPORTED