Multilingualism and language vitality
How multilingual communities organise language use, negotiate social change, and sustain linguistic practices under unequal conditions.
Linguist · Digital Archivist
R. Karthick
Narayanan
Languages in society.
Knowledge in context.
Archives for the future.
Research & practice
Language, multilingualism,
and the social life of archives.
Sociolinguistics · Documentation
Community-centred stewardship
My Research at a glance
I work at the intersection of sociolinguistics, language documentation, and digital archiving. My research examines multilingual life, language vitality, and the social conditions in which languages are maintained, marginalised, or displaced. Alongside field-based research, I work on community-centred approaches to documenting and stewarding linguistic and cultural knowledge.
Documentation and verbal art
Recording and studying spoken language, oral traditions, and other forms of linguistic and cultural expression with attention to their social context.
Digital archives and data stewardship
Designing and evaluating archives as sites of preservation, access, responsibility, and participation rather than as neutral storage systems.
Orthographies and language resources
Exploring how community participation, linguistic analysis, and digital tools can support language resources and writing-system choices.
Selected work
Field research
Toda and Kota in the Nilgiris
Multilingual practices, language choice, and the structural conditions shaping language vitality.
Archival practice
SiDHELA
Language collections and collaborative approaches to digital archiving in the Sikkim–Darjeeling Himalayas.
Collaborative scholarship
Field to Model · LiFE Suite
Community-based data collection, linguistic annotation, and language-technology workflows.
A research practice grounded in context
R. Karthick Narayanan is a linguist and digital archivist and serves as Executive Director of the Council for Diversity and Innovation (CoDIN). He holds a PhD in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research draws particularly on work with Toda and Kota communities in the Nilgiris and on documentation and archival initiatives in other regions of India.
Let’s keep the conversation going
For academic correspondence, research discussions, or enquiries about potential collaborations, please get in touch.
Email me