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Nuosu or Nosu (, transcribed as ), also known as Northern Yi, Liangshan Yi, and Sichuan Yi, is the
prestige language Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.) Prestige may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Films * ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnett ...
of 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 ...
; it has been chosen by the Chinese government as the standard Yi language () and, as such, is the only one taught in schools, both in its oral and written forms. It was spoken by two million people and was increasing as of (PRC census); 60% were monolingual (1994 estimate). Nuosu is the native Nuosu name for their own language and is not used in
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
, though it may sometimes be translated as ''Nuòsūyǔ'' (). The occasional terms "Black Yi" () and 'White Yi' () are
caste Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...
s of the Nuosu people, not dialects. Nuosu is one of several often
mutually unintelligible 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 ...
varieties known as Yi, Lolo, Moso, or Noso; the six Yi languages recognized by the Chinese government hold only 25% to 50% of their vocabulary in common. They share a common traditional writing system, though this is used for shamanism rather than daily accounting.


Dialects


Lama (2012)

Lama (2012) gives the following classification for Nuosu dialects. *Nuosu **''Qumusu (Tianba)'' **Nuosu proper ***Nuosu ****''Muhisu'' ****Nuosu (') *****''Yinuo'' *****''Shengzha'' ***Niesu (') ****''Suondi'' ****''Adu'' The Qumusu (曲木苏, Tianba 田坝) dialect is the most divergent one. The other dialects group as Niesu (聂苏, and Adu) and as Nuosu proper (Muhisu 米西苏, Yinuo 义诺, and Shengzha 圣乍). Niesu has both lost voiceless nasals and developed diphthongs. Adu (阿都话), characterized by its
labial–velar consonant Labial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips, such as . They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as the stop consonant and the approximant . Labial- ...
s, is spoken in the Butuo and Ningnan counties of
Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomous prefecture occupying much of the southern extremity of Sichuan province, People's Republic of China; its seat is Xichang. Liangshan ...
,
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 ...
province, and also in parts of Puge, Zhaojue,
Dechang Dechang ( is a county of southern Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomou ...
, and Jinyang counties. Nyisu or Yellow Yi (黄彝) of
Fumin County Fumin County () is a county, under the jurisdiction of Kunming, Yunnan, China. Administrative divisions Yongding Town and Daying Town, Luomian Yi Nationality and Miao Nationality Village, Sandan Village, Kuanzhuang Village, Dongcun Village and ...
, Yunnan may either be a Suondi Yi (Nuosu) dialect or Nisu dialect. Zhu and Zhang (2005) reports that the Shuitian people () reside mostly in the lowlands of the Anning River drainage basin, in Xichang, Xide, and Mianning counties of
Liangshan Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomous prefecture occupying much of the southern extremity of Sichuan province, People's Republic of China; its seat is Xichang. Liangshan ...
in
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 ...
. They are called Muhisu (''mu33 hi44 su33'') by the neighboring Yi highland people. Shuitian is spoken in the following locations. Shuitian belongs to the Shengzha dialect () of Northern Yi. *
Mianning County Mianning County () is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. History Mianning County has a long history of being a multi-ethnic region. The Annals of Mianning County (), pub ...
: Jionglong 迥龙, Lugu 泸沽, Hebian 河边; Manshuiwan 漫水湾Main datapoint used in Zhu & Zhang (2005) *
Xichang Xichang, formerly known as Jiandu, Jianchang and Ningyuan(fu), is a city in and the seat of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, in the south of Sichuan, China. In 2012 it had a population of 481,796. History The Qiongdu were the local peo ...
: Lizhou 礼州, Yuehua 月华 *
Xide County Xide County () (Northern Yi dialect: ꑝꅇꑤ xit ddop xiep /ɕɪ˥dʊ˨˩ ɕɛ˨˩/) is a county under the jurisdiction of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. Located in the southwestern mountainous ...
: Mianshan 冕山镇 (including Shitoushan Village 石头山村), Lake 拉克


Bradley (1997)

According to Bradley (1997), there are three main dialects of Nosu, of which the Southeastern one (Sondi) is most divergent. *Northern **Tianba 田坝 Northwestern **Yinuo 义诺 a.k.a. Northeastern *Central (Shengzha 圣乍) *Southeastern (Sondi) **Sondi **Adur


Chen (2010)

Chen (2010) lists the following dialects of Nosu. Also listed are the counties where each respective dialect is spoken. *Nosu 诺苏方言 **Senza, Shèngzhà 圣乍次方言 ***Senza, Shèngzhà 圣乍 ('): 1,200,000 speakers primarily in
Xide Xide County () (Northern Yi dialect: ꑝꅇꑤ xit ddop xiep /ɕɪ˥dʊ˨˩ ɕɛ˨˩/) is a county under the jurisdiction of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. Located in the southwestern mountainous ...
, Yuexi,
Ganluo Ganluo County (; Yi: ''ga lo xiep'') is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefec ...
, Jinyang, Puge, Leibo,
Xichang Xichang, formerly known as Jiandu, Jianchang and Ningyuan(fu), is a city in and the seat of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, in the south of Sichuan, China. In 2012 it had a population of 481,796. History The Qiongdu were the local peo ...
,
Dechang Dechang ( is a county of southern Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomou ...
, Mianning,
Yanyuan Yanyuan County (; ii, ꋂꂿꑤ ce mo xiep) is a county in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China, bordering Yunnan province to the west. The county is located in Sichuan's rugged Hengduan Mountains in southwest Sichuan, but the county se ...
,
Yanbian Yanbian (; Chosŏn'gŭl: , ''Yeonbyeon''), officially known as the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomous prefecture in the east of Jilin Province, China. Yanbian is bordered to the north by Heilongjiang Province, on the west by ...
, Muli,
Shimian Shimian County () is both the southernmost and westernmost county in the prefecture-level city of Ya'an, Sichuan Province, China. The county seat, Miancheng Subdistrict (), and the neighboring town, Xinmian (), are often together referred to as Sh ...
, Jiulong, and Luding; also in Huaping,
Yongsheng Yongsheng County () is located in the northwest of Yunnan province, China. It is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Lijiang. In 2019 the county had a population of 406,757 including 34.42% ethnic minorities. The Chenghai Lak ...
,
Ninglang Ninglang Yi Autonomous County (; ii, ꆀꆿꆈꌠꊨꏦꏱꅉꑤ nip lat nuo su zyt jie jux dde xiep) is located in the northwest of Yunnan province, China, bordering Sichuan province to the northeast. It is under the administration of Lijiang C ...
,
Lijiang Lijiang (), also known as Likiang, is a prefecture-level city in the northwest of Yunnan Province, China. It has an area of and had a population of 1,253,878 at the 2020 census whom 288,787 lived in the built-up area (metro) made of Gucheng ...
,
Jianchuan Jianchuan County () is a county in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture located in the western part of Yunnan Province, China. The county is about southwest of Lijiang and north of Dali. The historical town of Shaxi in the southeast of the coun ...
, Yongshan, and Qiaojia ***Yino, Yìnuò 义诺 ('): 600,000 speakers primarily in Meigu, Mabian, Leibo, and
Ebian Ebian Yi Autonomous County (; Yi: ') is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of Leshan Leshan, formerly known as Jiading or Jiazhou, is a prefecture-level city located at the confluence of the Dadu and Min river ...
,
Ganluo Ganluo County (; Yi: ''ga lo xiep'') is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefec ...
; also in Yuexi, Zhaojue, and Jinyang ***Lidim, Tiánbà 田坝 ('): 100,000 speakers primarily in
Ganluo Ganluo County (; Yi: ''ga lo xiep'') is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefec ...
, Yuexi, and
Ebian Ebian Yi Autonomous County (; Yi: ') is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of Leshan Leshan, formerly known as Jiading or Jiazhou, is a prefecture-level city located at the confluence of the Dadu and Min river ...
; also in Hanyuan **Sodi, Suǒdì 所地次方言 ('): 600,000 speakers primarily in Tuoxian,
Huili Huili (; Yi: or ''nyi ddix xiep'' or ''hop li xiep'') is a county-level city of far southern Sichuan province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. The county-level city was severely affected by t ...
, Huidong, Ningnan,
Miyi Miyi County () is a county in the far south of Sichuan Province 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 Protestan ...
,
Dechang Dechang ( is a county of southern Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Liangshan (; Yi: ''Niep Sha'', pronounced ), officially the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is an autonomou ...
, and Puge


Writing system

Classic Yi is a syllabic
logographic In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, a ...
system of 8,000–10,000 glyphs. Although similar to
Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
in function, the glyphs are independent in form, with little to suggest a direct relation. In 1958 the Chinese government had introduced a Roman-based alphabet based on the romanized script of
Gladstone Porteous Gladstone Charles Fletcher Porteous, Chinese name 張爾昌 Zhāng Ěrchāng (1874–1944), was an Australian missionary to China who served with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, China Inland Mission from 1904 and became Superintendent of th ...
of Sayingpan. This was later replaced by the Modern Yi script. The Modern Yi script ( 'Nosu script') is a standardized
syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
derived from the classic script in 1974. It was made the official script of the Yi languages in 1980. There are 756 basic glyphs based on the Liangshan dialect, plus 63 for syllables only found in Chinese borrowings. The government requires the use of the script for signs in some designated public places.Susan Gary Walters (2022): Nuosu script in the linguistic landscape of Xichang, China: a sociocultural subtext, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI:10.1080/01434632.2022.2094388


Phonology

The written equivalents of the phonemes listed here are "Yi Pinyin". For information about the actual script used see the section entitled "Writing System".


Consonants


Vowels

Nuosu has five pairs of phonemic vowels, contrasting in a feature Eatough calls ''loose throat'' vs. ''tight throat''. Underlining is used as an ad-hoc symbol for tight throat; phonetically, these vowels are
laryngealized In linguistics, creaky voice (sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry) refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which ...
and/or show a
retracted tongue root In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mong ...
. Loose vs. tight throat is the only distinction in the two pairs of syllabic consonants, but in the
vocoid A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
s it is reinforced by a
height Height is measure of vertical distance, either vertical extent (how "tall" something or someone is) or vertical position (how "high" a point is). For example, "The height of that building is 50 m" or "The height of an airplane in-flight is abou ...
difference. The syllabic consonants are essentially the usual Sinological vowels , so can be identified with the vowel of the Mandarin "four", but they have diverse realizations. completely assimilates to a preceding coronal except in voice, e.g. "to marry", and are after a labial nasal, e.g. "cloth". assimilates similarly after laterals, retaining its rounding, e.g. "to stir-fry", and is after a labial nasal, e.g. "mushroom"; moreover it induces a labially trilled release of preceding labial or alveolar stops, e.g. "to hit". The tight-throat phone occurs as the realization of in the high tone. That it is phonemically loose-throat is shown by its behaviour in tightness harmony in compound words. Nuosu syllable structure is (C)V.


Tones

* high / – written * high-mid / or mid falling / – written (written with diacritic ̑ over symbol in the syllabary) * mid / – unmarked * low falling / – written The high-mid tone is only marginally contrastive. Its two main sources are from
tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
rules, as the outcome of a mid tone before another mid tone, and the outcome of a low-falling tone after a mid tone. However, these changes do not occur in all compounds where they might: for instance "bear" + "mother" regularly forms "female bear", but "jackal" + "mother" forms "female jackal" without sandhi. The syntax creates other contrasts: tone sandhi applies across the boundary between object and verb, so is present in SOV clauses like "Mujy looks for Luti", but is absent in OSV clauses like "Luti looks for Mujy". A few words, like "what?", have underlying high-mid tone.


Vocabulary and grammar

Nuosu is an
analytic language In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the ...
, the basic word order is
Subject–object–verb Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...
. Vocabularies of Nuosu can be divided into
content words Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actio ...
and
function words In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...
. Among content words, nouns in Nuosu do not perform inflections for grammatical gender, number, and cases, classifiers are required when the noun is being counted; verbs do not perform conjugations for its persons and tenses; adjectives are usually placed after the word being fixed with a structural particle and do not perform inflections for comparison. Function words, especially
grammatical particles In grammar, the term ''particle'' (abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word associated with another word or phrase, generally in order to impart meaning. Altho ...
, have a significant role in terms of sentence constructions in Nuosu. Nuosu does not have article words, but conjunctions and
postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
words are used.


Numbers

Classifiers are required when numbers are used for fixing nouns.


References

* Andy Eatough. 1997
''Proceeding from Syllable Inventory to Phonemic Inventory in the Analysis of Liangshan Yi''
Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota session, volume 41. * *


Further reading

* Collective book, ''Ritual for Expelling Ghosts, A religious Classic of the Yi nationality in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan''. The Taipei Ricci Institute (November 1998) . * Ma Linying, Dennis Elton Walters, Susan Gary Walters (editors).
Nuosu Yi-Chinese-English Glossary
'. Nationalities Publishing House (2008). /H.638. * * Review o
Bilingual education and minority language maintenance in China: The role of schools in saving the Yi language
by Lubei Zhang and Linda Tsung. ''Journal of Linguistics'' 56: 450—454 (2020).


External links


Yi font by SIL

Pronunciation of Yi Consonant and Vowel

Learn Yi Vocabulary

Yi language edition of the People's Daily

Yi keyboard input



Large Chinese forum dedicated to speaking and studying Yi language
{{Lolo-Burmese languages Loloish languages Languages of China Yi people Languages attested from the 15th century