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1. Minority language education in Nepal: The view from a Himalayan village

   https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00003.hil  

   Hildebrandt, Kristine A.; Krim, Jessica S. (April 2018, Language Problems and Language Planning)

   This article, a case study in one group of communities of Nepal, considers minority language education in the face of increasing encroachment of the dominant and national language Nepali. Our over-arching research question asks, in the context of local education, what we can observe about the perceived value, use of, and competition between two local languages (Gurung, Gyalsumdo) and also between these languages and Nepali (the national language of Nepal) in the Manang District. We find persistent divisions amongst residents and educators about the current and future role of local languages. 

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2. Areal Analysis of Language Attitudes and Practices: A Case Study from Nepal

   Hildebrandt, Kristine A.; Hu, Shunfu (January 2017, Language documentation and conservation)

   This paper has two aims. One aim is to consider non-structural (language attitude and use) variables as valid in the field of dialect and linguistic geography in an inner Himalayan valley of Nepal, where four languages have traditionally co- existed asymmetrically and which demonstrate different degrees of vitality vs. endangerment. The other aim is an application of modified spatiality as it aligns with speaker attitudes and practices amidst recent and ongoing socio-economic and population changes. We demonstrate that variation in self-reported attitudes and practices across languages in this region can be explained as much with adjusted spatial factors (labeled ‘social space’) as with traditional social factors (e.g. gender, age, formal education, occupation, etc.). As such, our study contributes to a dis- course on the role and potential of spatiality in sociolinguistic analyses of smaller language communities. 

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3. CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion--Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding

   Belay, T; Ahmed, A; Grissom_II, A; Ameer, I; Sidorov, G; Kolesnikova, O; Yimam, S (July 2025, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL))

   NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available. 

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4. The encoding of space in Manange and Nar-Phu (Tamangic)

   Hildebrandt, Kristine A. (June 2017, Himalayan linguistics)

   This is an account of the forms and semantic dimensions of spatial relations in Manange (Tibeto-Burman, Tamangic; Nepal), with comparison to sister language Nar-Phu. Topological relations (“IN/ON/AT/ NEAR”) in these languages are encoded by locative enclitics and also by a set of noun-like objects termed as “locational nouns.” In Manange, the general locative enclitic is more frequently encountered for a wide range of topological relations, while in Nar-Phu, the opposite pattern is observed, i.e. more frequent use of locational nouns. While the linguistic frame of reference system encoded in these forms is primarily relative (i.e. oriented on the speaker’s own viewing perspective), a more extrinsic/absolute system emerges with certain verbs of motion in these languages, with verbs like “come,” “go,” and certain verbs of placement or posture orienting to arbitrary fixed bearings such as slope. This account also provides some examples of cultural or metaphorical extensions of spatial forms as they are encountered in connected speech. 

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5. The statistical and dynamic modeling of the first part of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine: The Revolution of Dignity and preceding times

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301639  

   Bahid, Yassin; Kutsenko, Olga; Rodríguez, Nancy; White, David (May 2024, PLOS ONE)

   Topaz, Chad M (Ed.)

   Ukraine’s tug-of-war between Russia and the West has had significant and lasting consequences for the country. In 2013, Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president aligned with Russia, opted against signing an association agreement with the European Union. This agreement aimed to facilitate trade and travel between the EU and Ukraine. This decision sparked widespread protests that coalesced in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, eventually becoming known as the Euromaidan protests. In this study, we analyze the protest data from 2013, sourced from Ukraine’s Center for Social and Labor Research. Despite the dataset’s limitations and occasional inconsistencies, we demonstrate the extraction of valuable insights and the construction of a descriptive model from such data. Our investigation reveals a pre-existing state of self-excitation within the system even before the onset of the Euromaidan protests. This self-excitation intensified during the Euromaidan protests. A statistical analysis indicates that the government’s utilization of force correlates with increased future protests, exacerbating rather than quelling the protest movement. Furthermore, we introduce the implementation of Hawkes process models to comprehend the spatiotemporal dynamics of the protest activity. Our findings highlight that, while protest activities spread across the entire country, the driving force behind the dynamics of these protests was the level of activity in Kyiv. Furthermore, in contrast to prior research that emphasized geographical proximity as a key predictor of event propagation, our study illustrates that the political alignment among oblasts, which are the distinct municipalities comprising Ukraine, had a more profound impact than mere geographic distance. This underscores the significance of social and cultural factors in molding the trajectory of political movements. 

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