Shakuntala Mahanta :

Specialises in phonology, a field of linguistics which deals with the mental representation of sounds produced by humans. She was awarded a fellowship by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS to pursue a PhD in Linguistics. As a result of her research in the Netherlands from September 2003, she recently received a doctoral degree from Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her dissertation entitled “Directionality and locality in vowel harmony (with special attention to vowel harmony in Assamese) shows for the first time that Assamese (Standard Colloquial) displays regressive vowel harmony, a process where vowels on the right hand side of a word influence all the vowels on the left to become ‘similar’ in a certain way.

   Shakuntala’s dissertation is shortly going to be published by Utrecht University, but a draft version of the dissertation (defended by her on June 15, 2007) can be downloaded from here: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2007-0620-202151/index.htm

She is now focused on the minority languages the North-East and is looking at some aspects of the phonology of some languages in the Tibeto-Burman group. She has published and presented her work in many places in Europe, U.S.A, and the U.K Shakuntala is currently affiliated to the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS as a post‑doctoral guest researcher.

Vowel harmony in Assamese-Should we know all about it.