The Naish languages are a low-level subgroup of

Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

that include Naxi, Na (Mosuo), and Laze.

Classification

The Naish languages are: *Naish **'' Naxi'' **'' Na'' (Narua, Mosuo) **'' Laze'' In turn, Naish together with Namuyi and

Shixing Shixing County (Postal romanization, postal: Chihing; ) is a county of Shaoguan, Guangdong province, China, bordering Jiangxi province to the east. The native variety of Chinese in the area is Hakka Chinese, Hakka. Climate References

...

constitutes the

Naic Naic, officially the Municipality of Naic ( tgl, Bayan ng Naic), is a 1st class municipality in the province of Cavite, Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 160,987 people. Naic has a land area of 76.24 square kilo ...

subgroup within Sino-Tibetan. Arguments for relatedness include irregular morphotonology: tone patterns of numeral-plus-classifier phrases that constitute shared structural properties. Since these similarities are phonetically nontransparent, they cannot be due to borrowing.

Names

Note that in Mainland China, the term "Naxi" is commonly used for the entire language group, e.g. by the influential linguistic introduction by He and Jiang (2015).Michaud, Alexis, He Limin & Zhong Yaoping. 2015.
Naxi / Naish
" In Rint Sybesma, Wolfgang Behr, Zev Handel & C.T. James Huang (eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics''. Leiden: Brill. The terms "Naish" and "Naic" are derived from the endonym ''Na'' used by speakers of several of the languages. These concepts were initially proposed by

Guillaume Jacques Guillaume Jacques (, b. 1979) is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families ...

Alexis Michaud Alexis Michaud is a French linguist specialising in the study of Southeast Asian languages, especially Naic languages and Vietnamese. He is also known for his work on the typology of tonal languages and as a foremost proponent of Panchronic phono ...

(2011).Jacques, Guillaume, and Alexis Michaud. 2011.
Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages: Naxi, Na and Laze
" ''Diachronica'' 28:468-498. Phylogenetic issues are summarized in the entry about the

subgroup. For a review of the literature about Naish languages, see Li (2015).Li Zihe 李子鹤. 2015. 纳西语言研究回顾——兼论语言在文化研究中的基础地位 (A review of Naxi language studies, with a discussion of the fundamental role of cultural studies for linguistic research). 茶马古道研究期刊 4. 125–131. TentativeSinoTibetanFamilyTreebyJacquesEtAl2011

TentativeSinoTibetanFamilyTreebyJacquesEtAl2011

Lexical innovations

Jacques & Michaud (2011) list the following words as Naish lexical innovations.

Reconstruction

Proto-Naish, the

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...

ancestral to the Naish languages, has been reconstructed by Jacques & Michaud (2011).

References

{{Na-Qiangic languages

Classification

Names

Lexical innovations

Reconstruction

See also

References