Gyalrong languages

Gyalrong
Native to	China
Region	Sichuan
Native speakers	83,000 (1999)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Qiangic Gyalrongic Gyalrong; ; ;
Dialects	Situ; Japhug; Tshobdun; Zbu;
Writing system	Tibetan script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	jya
Glottolog	core1262
	Map of Gyalrong languages

Gyalrong or rGyalrong (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་རོང, Wylie: rgyal rong, THL: gyalrong ), also rendered Jiarong (simplified Chinese: 嘉绒语; traditional Chinese: 嘉毧語; pinyin: jiāróng yǔ), or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China.

Name

The name Gyalrong is an abbreviation of Tibetan ཤར་རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང, shar rgyal-mo tsha-ba rong “Eastern Queen’s Fever Ravine”, a historical region of Kham now mostly located inside Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan.[2] This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎 or 嘉荣, jiāróng. It is pronounced [rɟɑroŋ] by speakers of Situ. It is a place-name and is not used by the people to designate their own language. The autonym is pronounced [kəru] in Situ and [kɯrɯ] in Japhug. Gyalrong speakers were previously classified as an independent ethnicity but were merged into the Tibetan ethnicity by the Chinese government in 1954.[3]

Languages

Based on mutual intelligibility, Gates (2014)[4] considers there to be five Gyalrong languages:

Situ (Chinese: Situ, 四土话) or less precisely Eastern Gyalrong
Japhug (Chinese: Chapu, 茶堡)
Tshobdun (Chinese: Caodeng, 草登; along with Zbu, next, also called Sidaba)
Zbu (Chinese: Ribu, 日部, also Rdzong'bur or Showu)
Gyalrong (south-central)

Situ has more than 100,000 speakers throughout a widespread area, while the other three languages, all spoken in Barkam, have fewer than 10,000 speakers each.[5] They are all tonal except for Japhug.

Most early studies on Gyalrong languages (Jin 1949, Nagano 1984, Lin 1993) focused on various dialects of Situ, and the three other languages were not studied in detail until the last decade of the 20th century. The differences between the four languages are presented here in a table of cognates. The data from Situ is taken from Huang and Sun 2002, the Japhug and Showu data from Jacques (2004, 2008) and the Tshobdun data from Sun (1998, 2006).

gloss	Situ	Japhug	Tshobdun	Showu
badger	pə́s	βɣɯs	ɣves	təvîs
dream	ta-rmô	tɯ-jmŋo	tɐ-jmiʔ	tɐ-lmɐʔ
I saw		pɯ-mtó-t-a	nɐ-mti-aŋ
sheep	kəjó	qaʑo	qɐɟjiʔ	ʁiɐʔ

Gyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features such as inverse marking (Sun and Shi 2002, Jacques 2010), ideophones (Sun 2004, Jacques 2008), and verbal stem alternations (Sun 2000, 2004, Jacques 2004, 2008). See Situ language for an example of the latter.

Demographics

Gates (2012: 102-106)[6] lists the following demographic information for 5 rGyalrong languages. Altogether, there are about 85,000 speakers for all 5 languages combined.

Language	Speakers	Villages	Dialects	Alternate names	Locations
Situ	35,000-40,000	57	7+	rGyalrong, kəru, roŋba	almost entirely in Barkam County; NE Jinchuan County; NW Li County
rGyalrong, South-central	33,000 (out of 45,000 ethnic people)	111	3+	rGyalrong, roŋba	Xiaojin, Danba, and Baoxing Counties
Japhug	4,000-5,000	19			3 townships in NE Barkam County, namely Lóng’ěrjiǎ, Dàzàng, and Shā’ěrzōng
Tshobdun	3,000	10		stodpaskʰət	Caodeng/Tsho-bdun (WT Tshobdun) Township, Barkam County
Zbu	6,000+	28		stodpaskʰət	Barkam, Rangtang, Seda, and Aba counties

Morphology and Syntax

In contrast to much of Sino-Tibetan, Gyalrong languages have a complex morphology; Japhug is polysynthetic. They tend to be prefixing, with Japhug being strongly so, with nine possible slots in its prefix chain. The Gyalrong verb distinguishes singular, dual, and plural numbers. While some parts of the Gyalrong prefix template are likely quite old, at least four slots in the prefix chain have been recently innovated.[7]

Syntactically, Gyalrong languages have SOV basic word order, and have been so for quite awhile, Jacques argues. This combination of SOV word order with prefixing tendencies is typologically quite rare, although it is found also in Ket and various Athabaskan languages.[7]

References

Gyalrong at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
Bennett, Daniel (25 November 2014), Rgyalrong Conservation and Change: Social Change On the Margins, p. 24, ISBN 9781483419510
《嘉絨藏族民俗志》，李茂，李忠俊著，p. 44
Gates, Jesse P. 2014. Situ in Situ: Towards a Dialectology of Jiarong (rGyalrong). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 80. Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 9783862884728
Jacques, Guillaumes. 2017. Rgyalrong language. In Encyclopedia of Chinese languages and linguistics (volume 3), p.583. Leiden: Brill.
Gates, Jesse P. 2012. Situ in situ: towards a dialectology of Jiāróng (rGyalrong). M.A. thesis, Trinity Western University.
Guillaume Jacques (2013). "Harmonization and disharmonization of affix ordering and basic word order". Linguistic Typology. 17 (2): 187–215. doi:10.1515/lity-2013-0009. S2CID 55555480.

Huang Liangrong 黄良荣, Sun Hongkai 孙宏开 2002. 汉嘉戎语词典 [A Chinese–rGyalrong dictionary] Beijing: Minzu chubanshe.
Jacques, Guillaume 2004. Phonologie et morphologie du Japhug (rGyalrong), thèse de doctorat, Université Paris VII.
Jacques, Guillaume 2008. 《嘉绒语研究》[A study on the rGyalrong language] Beijing: Minzu chubanshe.
Jacques, Guillaume (2012). "The inverse in Japhug Rgyalrong". Language and Linguistics. 11 (1): 127–157.
Jacques, Guillaume (2012). "From Denominal Derivation to Incorporation". Lingua. 122 (11): 1207–1231. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.383.1. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.05.010.
Jacques, Guillaume 向柏霖 2012. Argument demotion in Japhug Rgyalrong in Gilles Authier, Katharina Haude (eds) Ergativity, Valency and Voice. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 199–225. 2012
Jacques, Guillaume (2013). "Harmonization and disharmonization of affix ordering and basic word order". Linguistic Typology. 17 (2): 187–215. doi:10.1515/lity-2013-0009. S2CID 55555480.
Jacques, Guillaume (2013). "Ideophones in Japhug (Rgyalrong)". Anthropological Linguistics. 55 (3): 256–287. doi:10.1353/anl.2013.0014. S2CID 143579082.
Jacques, Guillaume (2014). "Denominal affixes as sources of antipassive markers in Japhug Rgyalrong". Lingua. 138: 1–22. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.011.
Jacques, Guillaume (2014). "Clause linking in Japhug". Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 37 (2): 264–328. doi:10.1075/ltba.37.2.05jac.
Jin Peng 金鹏 1949 Etude sur le Jyarung, Han hiue 汉学 3.3-4.
Lin Youjing 2003. Tense and Aspect morphology in the Zhuokeji rGyalrong verb, Cahiers de linguistique – Asie orientale 32(2), pp. 245–286
Lin Youjing, Luoerwu 2003. 《茶堡嘉戎语大藏话的趋向前缀与动词词干的变化》, 《民族語文》 2003.4.
Lin Youjing 2009. Units in Zhuokeji rGyalrong discourse; Prosody and Grammar, PhD University of California at Santa Barbara.
Lin Xiangrong 林向荣 1993. 《嘉戎语研究》[A study on the rGyalrong language] Chengdu: Sichuan Minzu chubanshe.
Nagano, Yasuhiko 1984 A Historical Study of the rGyarong Verb System. Seishido.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2007. The irrealis category in rGyalrong . Language & Linguistics 8(3):797-819.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心. 2006. 〈嘉戎語動詞的派生形態〉 , 《民族語文》 2006.4: 3-14.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心. 2006. 〈草登嘉戎語的關係句〉 [Relative clauses in Caodeng rGyalrong]. Language & Linguistics 7.4: 905-933.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心. 2004. 〈草登嘉戎語的狀貌詞〉 [The ideophones in Caodeng rGyalrong], 《民族語文》 2004.5: 1-11.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2004. Verb-stem variations in Showu rGyalrong . Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor of Professor Hwang-Cherng Gong on His Seventieth Birthday. Language and Linguistics, ed. by Ying-chin Lin et al., 269-296. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2003. Caodeng rGyalrong . Sino-Tibetan languages 490-502. London and New York: Routledge.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心. 2002. 〈草登嘉戎語與「認同等第」相關的語法現象〉 [Empathy Hierarchy in Caodeng rGyalrong Grammar]. Language & Linguistics 3.1: 79-99.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2000. Parallelisms in the verb morphology of Sidaba rGyalrong and Guanyinqiao in rGyalrongic . Language & Linguistics 1.1: 161-190.

External links

Guillaume Jacques, Overview of Rgyalrong languages
rGyalrongic Languages Database
Proto-rGyalrong reconstruction (Sino-Tibetan Branches Project)

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[e18-1] Gyalrong at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)

[2] Bennett, Daniel (25 November 2014), Rgyalrong Conservation and Change: Social Change On the Margins, p. 24, ISBN 9781483419510

[3] 《嘉絨藏族民俗志》，李茂，李忠俊著，p. 44

[4] Gates, Jesse P. 2014. Situ in Situ: Towards a Dialectology of Jiarong (rGyalrong). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 80. Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 9783862884728

[5] Jacques, Guillaumes. 2017. Rgyalrong language. In Encyclopedia of Chinese languages and linguistics (volume 3), p.583. Leiden: Brill.

[Gates2012-6] Gates, Jesse P. 2012. Situ in situ: towards a dialectology of Jiāróng (rGyalrong). M.A. thesis, Trinity Western University.

[Jacques2013-7] Guillaume Jacques (2013). "Harmonization and disharmonization of affix ordering and basic word order". Linguistic Typology. 17 (2): 187–215. doi:10.1515/lity-2013-0009. S2CID 55555480.