An activity based spoken language corpus of Nepali

Language is used for communication and communication facilitates social activities. If we want to capture this, linguistic investigation has to be carried out within a wider context. Examination of linguistic communication in a wider context shows that it is multimodal. In order to study naturalistic multimodal communication using a corpus, the corpus should contain a combination of recordings, documentation, and transcription of multimodal communication from different social activities in naturalistic settings, preserving unedited conversation. This paper presents a brief account of the principles, methodology, current status, and preliminary findings, based on an incrementally growing and multimodal activity based spoken language corpus of Nepali.