Naxi language


Naxi, also known as Nakhi, Nasi, Lomi, Moso, Mo-su, is a Sino-Tibetan language or group of languages spoken by some 310,000 people most of whom live in or around Lijiang City Yulong Naxi Autonomous County of the province of Yunnan, China. Nakhi is also the ethnic group that speaks it, although in detail, officially defined ethnicity and linguistic reality do not coincide neatly: there are speakers of Naxi who are not registered as "Naxi", and citizens who are officially "Naxi" but do not speak it.

Classification

It is commonly proposed in Chinese scholarship that the Naic languages are Lolo-Burmese languages: for instance, Ziwo Lama classifies Naxi as part of a "Naxish" branch of Loloish.
However, as early as 1975, Sino-Tibetan linguist David Bradley pointed out that Naxi does not partake in the shared innovations that define Loloish. Thurgood and La Polla state that "The position of Naxi... is still unclear despite much speculation", and leave it unclassified within Sino-Tibetan. Guillaume Jacques & Alexis Michaud classify Naxi within the Naish lower-level subgroup of Sino-Tibetan; in turn, Naish is part of Naic, itself part of a proposed "Na-Qiangic" branch.

Dialects

Naxi in the broad sense was initially split by the linguists He Jiren and Jiang Zhuyi into two major clusters, Western Naxi and Eastern Naxi.
Western Naxi is fairly homogeneous. It is spoken mainly in Lijiang, Zhongdian, Weixi, and Yongsheng counties. Smaller populations of Western Naxi speakers are found in Heqing, Jianchuan, Lanping, Deqin, Gongshan, Ninglang Muli, Yanbian, and Tibet. There over 240,000 speakers total. Western Naxi consists of the Dayan, Lijiangba, and Baoshanzhou dialects.
Eastern Naxi consists of several mutually unintelligible varieties. It is spoken mainly in Yanyuan, Muli, and Yanbian counties. Eastern Naxi is also spoken by smaller populations in Yongsheng, Weixi, and Lijiang counties. There is a total of over 40,000 speakers.
According to the 2000 Chinese census, 310,000 people speak Nakhi, and 100,000 of those are monolingual. Approximately 170,000 speak Chinese, Tibetan, Bai, or English as a second language. Almost all speakers live in Yunnan, but some are in Tibet, and it is possible that some live in Burma.
The language is commonly spoken among Nakhi people in everyday life and the language is in little danger of dying out soon, although the written literacy is still a rare skill. The language can be written in the Geba syllabary, Latin script or Fraser alphabet, but they are rarely used in everyday life and few people are able to read Naxi. The 1932 Naxi Gospel of Mark was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in the Fraser alphabet.
The three most common dialects are Lijiang, Lapao, and Lutien. Lijiang, which is spoken in the western parts of the language's range, is the most uniform of the three and it is heavily influenced by Standard Chinese and Yunnanese dialects, proved by its huge volume of loan words from Chinese. The eastern dialects, which are much more native and have many dialectal differences.

Phonology

The alphabet used here is the 1957 pinyin alphabet.

Consonants

Vowels

In the Lijiang dialect, there are nine vowels as well as syllabic :, written i, ei, ai, a, iu, ee, e, o, u. There is also a final, written er.

Tones

There are four tones: high level, mid-level, low level, and, in a few words, high rising. The tones are written -l, -, -q, -f.