Azha is one of the
Loloish languages
The Loloish languages, also known as Yi in China and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of fifty to a hundred Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in the Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to Burmese and its rela ...
spoken by the
Yi people
The Yi or Nuosu people,; zh, c=彝族, p=Yízú, l=Yi ethnicity historically known as the Lolo,; vi, Lô Lô; th, โล-โล, Lo-Lo are an ethnic group in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Numbering nine million people, they are the sev ...
of
China.
Innovations
In Azha, the words for ‘goat’, ‘eat’, and ‘drink’ are innovative (Pelkey 2011:377). Luojiayi Azha
[The representative dialect studied in Pelkey (2011) is that of Luojiayi 倮家邑, Binglie Township 秉烈乡, ]Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture
Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture is an autonomous prefecture in southeastern Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China and the easternmost prefecture-level division of the province. It borders Baise, Guangxi to the east, Vietnam ...
. ‘goat’, ‘eat’, ‘drink’ are not derived from Proto-Ngwi *(k)-cit
L ‘goat’, *dza² ‘eat’, and *m-daŋ¹ ‘drink’.
References
*Pelkey, Jamin. 2011. ''Dialectology as Dialectic: Interpreting Phula Variation''. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
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Loloish languages
Languages of China