Zhangzhung Heritage: A Documentation and Study of the Tibetan Variety Kopu in Jiuzhaigou County

Kopu is a Tibetan linguistic variety spoken within Jiuzhaigou County, Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province, by approximately 8,000 individuals. This language hasn't consistently been documented yet. According to the locals, it was inherited from the descendants of the ancient Zhangzhung's eighteen tribes migrated to the Bailong River basin.
Zhangzhung was an ancient civilization on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau predating the Tibetan Empire and played a crucial role in the spread of Buddhism. Kopu is a "living fossil" that can enable us to rediscover the linguistic world of ancient Zhangzhung. Therefore, it holds significant research value to understand the history of Buddhism, ancient Tibetan traditions, and Jiuzhaigou's culture.
This project aims at developing a complete documentation and comprehensive analysis of Kopu. Methods from field linguistics, computational linguistics, and philology are applied to process and interpret data, to reconstruct and define the linguistic features of the language, including its relationship with Zhangzhung and tonogenesis.