Burmo-Qiangic languages

The Burmo-Qiangic or Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages are a proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in southwestern China and Burma. It consists of the Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic branches. Tujia, Bai, and perhaps Karenic could also be members, or closely related.

Classification

Guillaume Jacques & Alexis Michaud (2011)^[2] argue for a Burmo-Qiangic branch of Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) with two primary subbranches, Qiangic and Lolo-Burmese. Similarly, David Bradley (2008)^[3] proposes an Eastern Tibeto-Burman branch that includes Burmic (AKA Lolo-Burmese) and Qiangic. Bradley notes that Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic share some unique lexical items, even though they are morphologically quite different; whereas all Lolo-Burmese languages are tonal and analytical, Qiangic languages are often non-tonal and possess agglutinative morphology. However, the position of Naic is unclear, as it has been grouped as Lolo-Burmese by Lama (2012), but as Qiangic by Jacques & Michaud (2011) and Bradley (2008). Jacques' & Michaud's (2011) proposed tree is as follows.

Bradley's (2008) proposal is as follows. Note that Bradley calls Lolo-Burmese Burmic, which is not to be confused with Burmish, and calls Loloish is Ngwi.

However, Chirkova (2012)^[4] doubts that Qiangic is a valid genetic unit, and considers Ersu, Shixing, Namuzi, and Pumi all as separate Tibeto-Burman branches that are part of a Qiangic linguistic area, rather than as part of a coherent Qiangic phylogenetic branch.

See also

• Pai-lang language

References

• Bradley, David. 1997. "Tibeto-Burman languages and classification". In D. Bradley (Ed.), Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas (Papers in South East Asian linguistics No. 14) pp. 1–71, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 978-0-85883-456-9.
• Bradley, David. 2008. The Position of Namuyi in Tibeto-Burman.
• Jacques, Guillaume, and Alexis Michaud. 2011. "Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages." Diachronica 28:468-498.
• Lama, Ziwo Qiu-Fuyuan (2012), Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages, thesis, University of Texas at Arlington (archived)