Nakhi language
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[edit] Spoken Nakhi
Nakhi is the name of the people living in northwester Yunnan, it is also the name of the language they speek.
In the one disctrict and four couties of Lijiang City, the residents of Old Town District and the Yulong County are Nakhi, and they speak Nakhi. In fact, these two administrative division compose the former Lijiang Nakhi Autonamous County.
With a lot of Han-Chinese merchanges moving into the old town of Lijiang, more Nakhi are speaking local dialect of Chinese.
In Schools, only Chinese is spoken, but in Nakhi families, they still speak Nakhi.
Nakhi have used a variety of scripts in the past, notably the Dongba and the Geba scripts.
[edit] Dongba
The earliest script used by the Nakhi, Dongba is an intriguing pictographic script developed by the Nakhi. Although beautiful, the Dongba script is difficult to interpret and takes many years to learn. Thus, it is not practical for daily use.
In the past, the Dongba (Nakhi scholar-priests) learnt the script, and would pass it on to future generations by oral instruction. With new generations losing interest in learning Dongba script from their fathers, it is now in danger of extinction.
With the establishment of the Dongba Culture Research Institute, affiliated to Yunan Provincial Social Science Institute, both Nakhi and Chinese scholars have tried to interpret existing scripts with help from numerous Dongba priests living in the remote rural villages.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, a Latin script was developed for the Nakhi language, although it didn't gain popularity. Today, Chinese is in daily use as an official language of the Nakhi. Formerly spoken at home, Nakhi is slowly disappearing, as young parents now usually speak Chinese at home to their children, thinking mastery of Chinese will benefit the future generation.
[edit] Geba
Structurally similar to the Chinese characters with some new inventions and simplified pictographs from the Dongba script, the Geba script was the result of Chinese cultural influence. Unlike Dongba, Geba was not as widely used, and it soon fell into disuse. Today, only Nakhi scholars do have some knowledge of the Geba script.
Written in horizontal lines running from left to right, the phonetic values of Geba symbols are not fixed. Instead, each user, who would also have been literate in Dongba, had a tendency to use one set of readings over another. Symbols can have either various phonetic values, or one phonetic value, which can be signified by a number of different graphs.
