Songlin ( zh, 松林语) is a divergent, unclassified
Sino-Tibetan
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. ...
language spoken in
Zayu County
Zayul County
()
KNAB, retrieved 5 July 2021.
[Nyingchi Prefecture
Nyingchi (), also known as Linzhi and as Nyingtri, is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. The administrative seat of Nyingchi is Bayi District.
Nyingchi is the location of Buchu Monastery.
Economy ...]
,
Tibet
Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa people, ...
. A linguistic description of Songlin has been published in a monograph by Song (2019).
Names
Songlin speakers refer to their language as sɑŋ³¹lin⁵⁵pu⁵⁵lo³¹ɟe⁵⁵, and to Songlin village as sɑŋ³¹lin⁵⁵ (Song 2019:6).
History of documentation
Jiang Huo (江获) first learned about the existence of Songlin while doing research on Idu during the 2000s, when local
Idu people in the Upper Chayu Town area reported that the "Songleng Tuyu" 松冷土语 was spoken nearby. After preliminary data was collected in 2014, intensive field work was conducted during the summers of 2015–2017 by a Chinese research team led by Li Daqin (李大勤) (Song 2019:13). A monograph documenting the Songlin language, ''Xizang Chayu Songlin yu'' (西藏察隅松林语), was written by Song Cheng (宋成) and submitted for publication in 2018. The book was released in 2019.
Demographics
The language is spoken in Songlin Village 松林村, Upper Chayu Town 上察隅镇 by approximately 1,000 people. The local
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
of the area is the Zayu dialect of
Khams Tibetan
Khams Tibetan () is the Tibetic languages, Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Amdo Tibetan and Ü-Tsang). In ...
. Some Songlin speakers can speak
Idu and
gSerkhu, both of which are also spoken in Upper Chayu Town 上察隅镇.
Songlin village is located on the western banks of the
Kangrigarbo Qu (贡日嘎布曲) river, several kilometers to the northwest of the Upper Chayu/Shangchayu Town (ʐoŋ³¹ȶø⁵⁵ in Songlin; located further downstream on the same river). Some nearby villages include Gonggu 巩固, Xiba 西巴 (ɕi⁵⁵tɑ⁵⁵ in Songlin), and Rongyu 荣玉 to the north, and Zongba 宗巴 and Migu 米古 to the south (Song 2019:6).
Classification
Song & Lin (2020) shows that Songlin is not closely related to any of the surrounding Tibeto-Burman languages and cannot be classified as a
Tibetic
The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries).Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptiv ...
language.
A computational phylogenetic study by Jiang (2023) also demonstrates the divergent position of Songlin.
Songlin and the
Mishmi languages The Mishmi languages consist of a few Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by the Mishmi people of Tibet, China and Arunachal Pradesh, India. They do not belong to a single branch or genetic grouping, but are rather a cultural grouping of various Sino-Tibe ...
all are spoken in
Zayu County
Zayul County
()
KNAB, retrieved 5 July 2021.
[
Consonant clusters include: nb, nd, nȡ, nɟ, ng, ndz, ndʑ, ndʐ, pʐ, pʰʐ, bʐ, nbʐ, kʐ, kʰʐ, gʐ, nbʐ, ngʐ. /n/- is treated as part of consonant clusters, rather than as part of prenasalized initial consonants.
Note: In ]Sinology
Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to th ...
, ȵ is roughly equivalent to or ʲ while ȶ and ȡ can typically be transcribed as ʲand ʲ respectively, although in practice they can actually be equivalent to ʃor ʒinstead, or other similar affricate
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...
s. Also, ɕ and ʑ often, but not always, correspond to and in IPA transcriptions used by non-Sinologists. For further information, see {{R from other capitalisation ...
.
Vowels
There are 12 vowels: i, y, ɯ, u, e, ø, o, ə, ɛ, ɑ, ɿ, ʮ (Song 2019:21–22).
Songlin has 5 diphthongs: ui, ɯi, ou, ie, iɛ.
Note that ɿ
is used by Sinologists, as well as ʮ (
̩ʷor
̩ʷ, which is a labialized syllabic
denti-alveolar approximant used by Sinologists.
Tones
There are three tones in Songlin.
About 50% of all words in Songlin have the high level tone /55/, while the mid rising /24/ and low falling /31/ tones are each found in approximately 25% of all Songlin words (Song 2019:24).
Script
Song (2019:30–32) proposes a
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
-based script for Songlin.
Tones are transcribed using the numerals 1, 2, and 3 (see the ''Tones'' section above):
Example phrase (Song 2019:33):
:ga1sii1 ga1sii1 dyv1 neng3
:'once upon a time'/'a very long time ago' (很久很久以前)
Morphology
Some common prefixes in Songlin are (Song 2019:43):
*ɑ³¹-: nominal prefix
*mɑ³¹-: nominal prefix
*kə³¹-: used before some verbs, some body parts, and various nouns
Some suffixes are:
*-pɑ⁵⁵: used with human-related terms, body parts, and others
*-tso⁵⁵: 'son' (儿); masculine/diminutive, used to mark an animate noun (person or animal) as male, juvenile, or small
Reduplication is commonly used to form new nouns (Song 2019:45–46).
Pronouns
The Songlin pronouns are (Song 2019:134):
Interrogatives
Songlin interrogatives are (Song 2019:140):
Sentence examples
The following Songlin sentence examples are from Yan (Song 2020:656). Songlin has
SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, Service Operations Vessel
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail station ...
.
Vocabulary
The following are Songlin words cited from Song (2020).
References
{{Sino-Tibetan languages
Unclassified Sino-Tibetan languages
Languages of China
Languages of Tibet