Wasa Ball
New York, NY| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program |
| Project Title: | Vyakarana and the Sanskrit Linguistic Legacy |
| Field of Study: | Linguistics |
| Home Institution: | Columbia University, New York, NY |
| Host Institution: | Deccan College, Pune, Maharashtra |
| Grant Start Month: | September 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Wasa Ball graduated from Columbia University with a BA in linguistics and philosophy, and a minor in anthropology. Her research experiences include experimental linguistics fieldwork as an NSF-IRES fellow in Guadeloupe with Dr. Isabelle Barrière, conducting empirical studies on the understudied French-based Creoles, as well as corpora analysis as an NSF-REU research assistant at the AI4CommSci lab with Dr. Joshua Hartshorne, documenting the endangered languages of Taiwan. Other work experience includes two semesters as a teaching assistant. Her interests lie in the interdisciplinary investigation of language, wherein she traces the global grammatical traditions of linguistics and philosophy to diversify and deepen cross-cultural and cross-historical understanding about the field.
Wasa’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is honing in on the legacy of Sanskrit as a language central to the development of linguistics as a field of study, particularly through vyakarana, or grammatical study in ancient India. She is working primarily with the texts of key grammarians like Panini, Yaska, and Bhartrhari to track the history of linguistic analysis across phonology, morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, and the philosophy of language in the early explorations of human language surfacing in Vedic scholarship and in the traditions of methodological linguistic exploration. Based in Pune, Maharashtra, at Deccan College’s Department of Sanskrit, the project, through literary analysis and synthesis of original Sanskrit sources, is tracing the contributions of Sanskrit linguistics to shed light on its cross-historical and cross-cultural impacts. The project is also seeking innovative ways to apply ancient knowledge to today’s global issues in theoretical linguistics.