Southeast Asia is the home of extremely high levels of social diversity, including cultural and linguistic. Many of the languages of Asia have not been described, nor do we have a good understainding of how multilingualism fucntions in Southeast Asian societies. The key area of research are the Lao-Chinese border and Lao-Vietnam border areas.

Expressives, or ideophones as they are known in other regions, lie somewhere between grammar and poetry, and thus by definition require multidisciplinary approaches to research. Southeast Asia and South Asia both have rich areas of expressive language, which is closely related to not only culture and knowledge systems, but is also an area of performance in daily life that hsa not recieved much attention. This research builds upon experience with endangered languages of Laos and Myanmar, and benefits from exchange and comparative analysis with researchers from South Asia.