The Himalayan Languages Project, launched in 1993, is a research collective based at Leiden University and comprising much of the world's authoritative research on the lesser-known and endangered languages of the Himalayas, in Nepal, China, Bhutan, and India.
Its members regularly spend months or years at a time doing field research with native speakers.
The project recruits graduate students to collect field data on little-known languages for their Ph.D. dissertations.
The Himalayan Languages Project was officially commissioned by the government of Bhutan to devise a standard romanization of Dzongkha.
Since George van Driem's move to the University of Bern, many members of the Himalayan Languages Project are now based out of Switzerland.