Southern Qiang language


Southern Qiang is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Qiangic branch spoken by approximately 81,300 people along the Minjiang river in Sichuan Province, China.
Unlike its close relative Northern Qiang, Southern Qiang is a tonal language.

Southern Qiang dialects

Southern Qiang is spoken in Li County, Wenchuan County, 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, Wagsod, and Outside/Outer Mantse . The Southern Qiang dialect of Puxi Township has been documented in detail by Huang.
Liu adds Sānlóng and Jiàocháng to the Southern subdialects.
Sims characterizes Southern Qiang as the perfective agreement suffixes innovation group. Individual dialects are highlighted in italics.
;Southern Qiang
Consonants are presented in the table below.
LabialDentalRetroflexPalato-alveolarPalatalVelarUvular
Voiceless stopptkq
Aspirated stop
Voiced stopbdɡ
Voiceless affricatets
Aspirated affricate
Voiced affricatedz
Voiceless fricativefsx
Voiced fricativez
Nasalmn
Laterall
Semivowelj, 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.