Gyalrong or rGyalrong (), also rendered Jiarong (), or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the

Gyalrongic languages The Gyalrongic languages (also known as Rgyalrongic or Jiarongic) constitute a branch of the Qiangic languages of Sino-Tibetan, although some propose that it may be part of a larger Rung languages group, and do not consider it to be particularly ...

spoken by the

Gyalrong people Gyalrong people (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་རོང, Chinese:嘉绒), also called Jiarong, rGyalrong, are speakers of the Qiangic Gyalrong language who live in the southern part of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan, China. T ...

in Western

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic.

Name

The name ''Gyalrong'' is an abbreviation of Tibetan , ''shar rgyal-mo tsha-ba rong'' , "the hot valleys of the queen", to which the queen being Mount Murdo (in Tibetan, ''dmu-rdo'').Prins, Marielle. 2011. A web of relations: A grammar of rGyalrong Ji omùzú, p. 18. Mount Murdo is in the historical region of Kham, now mostly located inside

Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, also known as Aba (; Qiang: ; ), is an autonomous prefecture of northwestern Sichuan, bordering Gansu to the north and northeast and Qinghai to the northwest. Its seat is in Barkam, and it has an ar ...

. This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎 or 嘉荣, ''jiāróng''. It is pronounced 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 in Situ and in Japhug. The Gyalrong people are the descendents of former Tibetan warriorsat the border, where they later settled there as the time went by.

Languages

Based on

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

, Gates (2014) 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 Barkam or Markang or Muerkvua is a county-level city in Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, in the northwest of Sichuan province, People's Republic of China. The city seat is the town of Barkam. Administrative divisions Barkam has ...

, have fewer than 10,000 speakers each. 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 Ancient and noble French family names, Jacques, Jacq, or James are believed to originate from the Middle Ages in the historic northwest Brittany region in France, and have since spread around the world over the centuries. To date, there are over ...

(2004, 2008) and the Tshobdun data from Sun (1998, 2006). : 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 Situ () is a Rgyalrong language spoken in Sichuan, China. The name "Situ", literally "four Tusi", comes from a historical name of the Ma'erkang region. Distribution Gates (2012: 102-103) lists the following locations where Zbu is spoken. It is ...

for an example of the latter.

Demographics

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

Morphology and Syntax

In contrast to much of Sino-Tibetan, Gyalrong languages have a complex morphology; Japhug is

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

. 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. Syntactically, Gyalrong languages have SOV basic word order, and have been so for quite a while, 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 Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...

References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

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 ...