Dr. Priyanka Pradeepkumar

Assistant Professor

Dr. Priyanka Pradeepkumar is Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at MAHE, Bengaluru. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Phonetics from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, where her doctoral research examined language vitality, maintenance, and digital preservation among an indigenous community in Kerala. Supported by the UGC Junior Research Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship, her work combined sociolinguistic fieldwork, language documentation, and digital approaches to language preservation. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language documentation, endangered languages, language maintenance, folklore studies, discourse analysis, and digital humanities. She has worked with multiple indigenous language communities in India, including Cholanaikkan, Gutob, and Irula. As Subject Matter Expert to the Government of Tamil Nadu’s Tholkudi Digital Archive Project, she contributed to the linguistic analysis, corpus development, annotation, and digital archiving of the Irula language. She has also collaborated with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (USA) on the annotation of Gutob, an endangered Munda language spoken in Odisha. In addition to her academic research, she worked as Subject Matter Expert with Lionbridge Technologies, contributing to multilingual language resources and language annotation projects. At DLHS (MILHS), MAHE Bengaluru, she teaches Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Academic Writing and Communication studies. She has developed courses in Sociolinguistics, Applied and Theoretical Linguistics, ESP, Portfolio Building and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research in language, culture, media, and society. Her research and outreach on endangered language documentation have been presented internationally, including at the South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and the Prairie Workshop on Languages and Linguistics (PWoLL VI) at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where she conducted a workshop on digitising the endangered Cholanaikkan language through digital tools. In 2026, she received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Indian Cinema: Social Realities and Managerial Insights hosted by IIM Ranchi.

Qualification: BA (Hons),MA ,PhD