Naxi language

Naxi
Na
Spoken in China
Region Yunnan and Tibet
Ethnicity Nakhi, Mosuo
Native speakers 309,000  (2000 census)
Language family
Writing system Dongba script and Geba script
Official status
Official language in People's Republic of China
Regulated by No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-3 nbf – Macrolanguage
individual codes:
nxq – Naxi
nru – Narua
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Naxi (also known as Nakhi, Nasi, Lomi, Moso, Mo-su) is a Tibeto-Burman language or group of languages spoken by some 310,000 people concentrated in the Lijiang City Yulong Naxi Autonomous County (Yùlóng Nàxīzú Zìzhìxiàn 玉龍納西族自治縣) of the province of Yunnan, China. Nakhi is also the name of the ethnic group that speaks it.

Contents

Classification

There are at least two Naxi languages. Western Naxi is fairly homogeneous, whereas Eastern Naxi consists of several mutually unintelligible dialects.

It is commonly proposed that these languages lie within the Lolo–Burmese languages, though views vary on whether to include it within one of the branches of this group, or to make it a sibling equidistant to Lolo and Burmese. However, Thurgood and La Polla (2003) state that "The position of Naxi ... is still unclear despite much speculation," and leave it unclassified within Tibeto-Burman.[1]

The syntactic structure is similar to other Tibeto-Burmese languages spoken in Yunnan.

Usage

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 Dongba script, the Latin alphabet or the Geba script, but all these written forms are still rarely used in everyday life and most local people are not able to read it.

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 Putonghua 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.

Nakhi is also the name of an official nationality that speaks Naxi. They generally resent usage of the old term "Moso".

Naxi phonemes

Consonants

IPA and Naxi Pinyin orthography
Labial Labiodental Dental Retroflex Alveolo-palatal Palatal Velar Glottal
Voiceless stop p b t d c ? k g ʔ
Aspirated stop pʰ p tʰ t cʰ ? kʰ k
Voiced stop b bb d dd ɟ ? ɡ gg
Prenasalized stop ᵐb nb ⁿd nd ᶮɟ ? ᵑɡ mg
Voiceless affricate ts z tʂ zh tɕ j
Aspirated affricate tsʰ c tʂʰ ch tɕʰ q
Voiced affricate dz zz dʐ rh dʑ jj
Prenasalized affricate ⁿdz nz ⁿdʐ nr ⁿdʑ nj
Voiceless fricative f f s s ʂ sh ɕ x x h
Voiced fricative v v z ss ʐ r ʑ y ɣ w
Nasal m m n n ɲ ni ŋ ng
Lateral l l
Flap or trill r ?
Semivowel w u, ɥ iu j i

Vowels

In the Lijiang dialect, there are nine vowels. They are: /i, e, a, ɑ, y, ɨ, ə, o, u/, written i, ee, ei, a, iu, v, e, o, u, ai, er (not necessarily in that order).

Tones

There are four tones: high level, mid-level, low level (or falling), and low rising. They are written -l, -, -q, -f.

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ The Sino-Tibetan Languages, pp. 19–20

External links