Hi! My name is Maaz Ahmad Shaikh (UR/AR: معاذ احمد شیخ; HI: माज़ अहमद शेख़; pronounced as: mäːz ɛɦˈmɐd̪ ʃeːχ [Urdu] / mɐˈʕaːð ɐħˈmɐd̪ ʃɐj̯x [Arabic]).

I am a linguist based in Edmonton, Canada. I currently work as a researcher and GIS specialist with Kinspeak, contributing to Métis oral history, genealogy, and Indigenous Knowledge research in the Northwest Territories.

I completed my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Alberta in September 2026 with a dissertation titled Towards a grammatical description of Zangskari, supervised by Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada, with committee members Benjamin Tucker, Shobhana Chelliah, and David Beck. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India).

My research lies at the intersection of language documentation and description, grammar writing, morphosyntax, phonology, and language revitalization. I work primarily on Western Tibetic languages of Ladakh, with a particular focus on Zangskari, which I have been documenting since 2020 through sustained fieldwork, archiving, and community collaboration. I also work on Indo-Aryan languages, especially Azamgarhi, an underdescribed Awadhic variety and my heritage language. More broadly, I am interested in comparative approaches to grammar writing and the linguistic ecology of the Awadh and Purvanchal regions of Uttar Pradesh, India.

Outside of linguistics, I enjoy gardening, cooking, coffee, cycling, hiking, swimming, traveling, reading, and spending time in nature.

Selected updates

• September 2026 – Successfully defended my PhD dissertation, Towards a grammatical description of Zangskari, at the University of Alberta.
• 2026 – Manuscript on the sociolinguistic context of Zangskari received a revise-and-resubmit decision from Language Documentation and Description.
• July 2025 – Began freelance Hindi localization work for AI training data through SIDE Global.
• December 2024 – Paper Evolution of grammar writing in Tibetic: A study of best practices from 1831 to the present (with Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada) accepted for publication in Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences.
• December 2024 – Awarded the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research (FFAR) Oral Literature Grant for Documentation of the Zangskari version of the Epic of Gesar ($9,990 USD).
• 2024–2025 – Digital Scholarship Fellowship, Digital Scholarship Centre, University of Alberta ($1,200 CAD).
• 2024–2026 – Linguistics Colloquium Liaison, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta.
• 2023 – Mitacs Globalink Research Award: Empowering communities to preserve their heritage: A citizen science approach to language documentation ($6,000 CAD).

Current projects

Zangskari Gesar Epic documentation
Documentation and annotation of the Zangskari version of the Epic of Gesar, recorded with two Elder narrators and supported by the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research. The project focuses on building an annotated audiovisual corpus with multilingual subtitles and experimental AI-assisted visualizations to support both community access and linguistic research.

Publications from the dissertation
My paper-based dissertation, grounded in a documentary corpus built from fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2025 in Zangskar, Ladakh, is being developed into journal publications: a study of grammar writing in Tibetic (accepted in Linguistics), a sociolinguistic profile of Zangskari (under revision for Language Documentation and Description), and an Illustration of the IPA for Zangskari with Benjamin Tucker (in preparation for the Journal of the International Phonetic Association).

Indigenous Knowledge and oral history research
With Kinspeak, I contribute to oral history, genealogy, and Indigenous Knowledge research for Métis communities in the Northwest Territories, including GIS-based land use mapping.

Project snapshots

Documentation of Zangskari

My primary research project documenting Zangskari, a threatened Western Tibetic language spoken in the Zangskar valley of Ladakh, India.

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Field methods on Ladakhi (2019)

Early field-based work on Ladakhi conducted during my MA in Linguistics at the University of Delhi, culminating in a thesis on interrogation in Ladakhi.

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Documentation of Azamgarhi

Documentation of Azamgarhi, an underdescribed Awadhic (Indo-Aryan) language and my heritage language, with a focus on verbal morphology and corpus development.

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Documentation of Bhojpuri

Comparative documentation of Western Bhojpuri in relation to Azamgarhi, examining sociolinguistic influence and structural variation.

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