Bai language

Not to be confused with Bai language (South Sudan).
Bai
白语 Báiyǔ
Baip‧ngvp‧zix
Native to Yunnan, China
Ethnicity Bai
Native speakers
 1.3 million (2003)[1]
Dialects
Jianchuan-Dali
Panyi–Lama
? Laemae
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Variously:
bca – Central Bai, Jianchuan dialect
bfs – Southern Bai, Dali dialect
bfc – Northern Bai, Bijiang dialect (Panyi Bai)
lay – Lama Bai?
ISO 639-6 bicr
Glottolog baic1239[2]

The Bai language (Bai: Baip‧ngvp‧zix; simplified Chinese: 白语; traditional Chinese: 白語; pinyin: Báiyǔ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai people. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tonal language with eight tones and a rather rich set of vowels. As is common among Southeast Asian languages, the vowels of Bai have a phonemic opposition between tense vowels and lax vowels (creaky voice vs. normal voice). There exists a small amount of traditional literature written with Chinese characters, Bowen (僰文), as well as a number of recent publications printed with a recently standardized system of romanisation using the Latin alphabet.

Varieties

Within the core Bai area, three dialects are recognized, which may actually be distinct languages: Jianchuan (Central), Dali (Southern), and Bijiang (Northern). Jianchuan and Dali are close, and speakers are reported to be able to understand one another after living together for a month. Bijiang is more divergent, and may itself be two languages, Panyi and Lama, the latter mixed with Nung.

The Laemae (lɛ˨˩mɛ˨˩, Leimai, Leimo), a clan numbering about 50,000 people who are submerged within the Lisu, are reported to speak a "Bai group language" (Bradley 2007:363). Bradley (2007) estimates that there are about 15,000 speakers of Laemae in Fugong County, Yunnan. Lisu and Northern Bai are also spoken in the region.

Wang Feng (2012)[3] gives the following tree for 9 Bai dialects (datapoints). The Lama (拉玛) are in Tuoluo, Gongxing, and Enqi; the Lemo (勒墨) are in Ega and Jinman.

Bai

Classification

The position of this language (or language group) within the Sino-Tibetan family is undetermined. Traditionally, Bai has been considered to be a Tibeto-Burman language, but starting with R.A.D. Forrest in 1948, the rival argument has been made that it is instead an offshoot of Proto-Sinitic, coordinate with Old Chinese. Within the last generation, this argument has been taken up by Sergei Starostin, G. van Driem, and S. Zhengzhang. The state of the debate on the genetic position of Bai is surveyed by Wang (2005), who points out that the proper investigation of the issue is hampered by the fact that Proto-Bai, the ancestor of the three modern dialects, has yet to be reconstructed. Indeed, the dialects themselves have not yet all been thoroughly described.

The question is complicated by the fact that Bai vocabulary has been influenced over millennia by both neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages and several varieties of Chinese. The Sinologist Jerry Norman has stated: "While it would probably be going too far to consider Bái a Sinitic [Chinese] dialect, its close links to Sinitic cannot easily be dismissed."[4]

Grammar

Bai has a basic syntactic order of subject–verb–object (SVO). However, SOV word order can be found in interrogative and negative sentences.

Notes

  1. ↑ Central Bai, Jianchuan dialect at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Southern Bai, Dali dialect at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Northern Bai, Bijiang dialect (Panyi Bai) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Lama Bai? at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Baic". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Wang Feng [汪锋]. (2012). Language Contact and Language Comparison: The Case of Bai [语言接触与语言比较:以白语为例 ]. Beijing: Commercial Press [商务印书馆]. 92–94
  4. ↑ Norman 2003:73

Further reading

External links

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