The discovery of the Kham group of languages in Nepal in 1969 is one of the remarkable finds in Tibeto-Burman linguistics this century – it happened against the backdrop of nearly two centuries of fairly intense linguistic activity in the whole of the Indian subcontinent. It was in this setting, for example, that Sir William Jones, in 1786, made his now-famous pronouncement before the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta that Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit had all ‘sprung from some common source’; a source, which, ‘perhaps, no longer exists.’ His pronouncement profoundly changed the face of linguistics; language origins and language evolution became the new challenge of linguistic inquiry in the nineteenth century.

Sparked by the imagination of a new-found science, the British in India expanded their range of inquiry and began amassing a wealth of linguistic materials from numerous Himalayan languages and dialects – some, like Kusunda, with as few as a dozen speakers. Because the British had no direct access to Nepal, most of the early samples were collected by British military officers from Nepalese tribesmen serving as mercenaries in the British Gurkha army. Colonel Kirkpatrick, for example, collected a short vocabulary of the Magar language, spoken by one of the ‘military tribes’ of Nepal, as early as 1793, and Francis Hamilton, a British historian and philologist, deposited a more complete specimen of the same language in the Company's library sometime before 1814.