Southern Qiang language
Southern Qiang is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Qiangic branch spoken by approximately 81,300 people along the Minjiang (Chinese: 岷江) river in Sichuan Province, China.
Southern Qiang | |
---|---|
Region | Sichuan Province |
Ethnicity | Qiang people |
Native speakers | 81,000 (1999)[1] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | qxs |
Glottolog | sout2728 [2] |
Unlike its close relative Northern Qiang, Southern Qiang is a tonal language.
Southern Qiang dialects
Southern Qiang is spoken in Li County (in Taoping Chinese: 桃坪, etc.), Wenchuan County (in Longxi 龙溪, Luobozhai 萝卜寨, Miansi 绵虒, etc.), and parts of Mao County. It consists of seven dialects: Dajishan, Taoping, Longxi, Mianchi, Heihu, Sanlong, and Jiaochang, which are greatly divergent and are not mutually intelligible.
Names seen in the older literature for Southern Qiang dialects include Lofuchai (Lophuchai, Lopu Chai), Wagsod (Wa-gsod, Waszu),[3] and Outside/Outer Mantse (Man-tzŭ).[4] The Southern Qiang dialect of Puxi Township has been documented in detail by Huang (2007).[5]
Liu (1998) adds Sānlóng (Chinese: 三龍) and Jiàocháng (較場) to the Southern subdialects.[6]
Sims (2016)[7] characterizes Southern Qiang as the perfective agreement suffixes innovation group. Individual dialects are highlighted in italics.
- Southern Qiang
Southern Qiang consonants
Consonants are presented in the table below.[8]
Labial | Dental | Retroflex | Palato-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Voiceless stop | p | t | k | q | |||
Aspirated stop | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | qʰ | |||
Voiced stop | b | d | ɡ | ɢ | |||
Voiceless affricate | ts | ʈʂ | tʃ | tɕ | |||
Aspirated affricate | tsʰ | ʈʂʰ | tʃʰ | tɕʰ | |||
Voiced affricate | dz | ɖʐ | dʒ | dʑ | |||
Voiceless fricative | f | s | ʂ | ɕ | x | χ | |
Voiced fricative | z | ʐ | ʑ | ɣ | ʁ | ||
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||
Lateral | l | ||||||
Semivowel | j, ɥ | w | |||||
Status
As with many of the Qiangic languages, Southern Qiang is becoming increasingly threatened. Because the education system largely uses Standard Chinese as a medium of instruction for the Qiang people, and as a result of the universal access to schooling and TV, most Qiang children are fluent or even monolingual in Chinese while an increasing percentage cannot speak Qiang.[9]
See also
References
- Southern Qiang at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Southern Qiang". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- John McCoy & Timothy Light, ed., 1986, Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies, pp. 40, 65.
- UC Berkeley, 1992, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 15, pp. 76–77.
- Huang, Chenlong 黄成龙. 2007. Puyuxi Qiangyu yanjiu 蒲溪羌语研究 (Studies on Puxi Qiang). Beijing: Ethnic Publishing House 民族出版社. ISBN 9787105089772. (in Chinese)
- Liu, Guangkun (1998). Mawo Qiangyu Yanjiu. Sichuan Nationality Press.
- Sims, Nathaniel. 2016. Towards a More Comprehensive Understanding of Qiang Dialectology. Language and Linguistics 17(3), 351–381. DOI:10.1177/1606822X15586685
- Sun, Hongkai (1981). Qiangyu Jianzhi. Nationality Press.
- Randy J. LaPolla, Chenglong Huan (2003). A Grammar of Qiang: With annotated texts and glossary. Mouton de Gruyter. p. 5. ISBN 978-3110178296.
Bibliography
- Bradley, David. (1997). "Tibeto-Burman languages and classification". In D. Bradley (Ed.), Papers in South East Asian linguistics: Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas (No. 14, pp. 1–71). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Chang, Kun. 1967. "A comparative study of the Southern Ch'iang dialects". Monumenta Serica, XXVI:422 - 443.
- Evans, Jonathan P. 2001a. Introduction to Qiang Lexicon and Phonology: Synchrony and Diachrony. Tokyo:ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.