Jino language


Jino Language Jino language is a pair of Loloish languages spoken by the Jino people of Yunnan.

Varieties

In total, there are about 28,320 Jinuo people living in China. 70–80% of Jinuo people can speak Jino fluently. The Jino languages has two subdialects of Youle Jino and Buyuan Jinuo, and they are not mutually intelligible.
Buyuan Jinuo is spoken by 21,000 people Most of the speakers are monolingual, which means they only speak Jino language. There is no official written form. Most Jino also speak one of the Tai languages or Chinese. The ISO 639-3 code for the Jino language is "jiu" for Youle Jino, or "jiy" for Buyuan Jino. The Glottocode for Jino language is "youl1235" for Youle Jino, or "buyu1238" for Buyuan Jino.

Classification

The exact classification of Jino within the Loloish branch of Sino-Tibetan language family remains uncertain. Jino is classified as a Southern Loloish language by Ziwo Lama, but as a Central Loloish language by Bradley. Jino is also classified as a Southern Loloish language in Satterthwaite-Phillips' computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages.

History

The language usage is rapidly eliminating, in the 1980s there was 70–80% of Jinuo people used Jino language. In 2000, There was less than 50% of the population can speak Jino language.
Jino was recognized by the state council on 6 June 1979 as the last recognized minority nationality in China.
Historically, Jino people was organized as a matriarchal culture, and “Jino” means “descending from the uncle,” and it refers to the importance of mother’s brother in matriarchal societies.
From language aspect, Jino language is similar to other languages under the branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages, because Jino people moved from the northwest of Yunnan province to the territories they are at now, but the timing and routes of this migration remain uncertain,

Geographic distribution

Jinuo Township, located in Jinghong City of the Sipsongpanna Dai autonomous prefecture of Yunnan province, China.

Tonemes

There are five tonemes in Buyuan Jino language. Gai believes that the function of tonemes are distinguishing lexical meanings and grammatical meanings.
  1. value tone : it tends to exhibit vowels that are phonetically shortened
  2. value tone : lower than 55, though high
  3. value tone: low
  4. value tone : rising
  5. value tone : falling from the top level
value tone is considered difficult to tell when listen to native speaker

Writing system

Since there is no official written form for Jino, therefore, Jino does not have a writing system, but it developed several systems of signs to cover communication in different situations. They used engraved wooden or bamboo boards to record debts between villages.