Dulong (

simplified Chinese Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to: Mathematics Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one, that is simpler (usually shorter), for example * Simplification of algebraic expressions, ...

: 独龙语;

traditional Chinese A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays ...

: 獨龍語;

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...

: ''Dúlóng'') or Drung, Derung, Rawang, or Trung, is a

Sino-Tibetan language 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. ...

in China. Dulong is closely related to the Rawang language of

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

(Burma). Although almost all ethnic

Derung people The Derung (also spelt ''Drung'' or ''Dulong'') people (; endonym: ) are an ethnic group. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by China. Their population of 6,000 is found in the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture of Yun ...

speak the language to some degree, most are

multilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

, also speaking Burmese,

Lisu Lisu may refer to: *Lisu people, an ethnic group of Southeast Asia *Lisu language, spoken by the Lisu people * Old Lisu Alphabet or Fraser Alphabet *Lisu syllabary * Lisu (Unicode block), the block of Unicode characters for the Lisu language. *Lisu ...

, and

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

Chinese except for a few very elderly people Dulong is also called: Taron, Kiu, Qui, Kiutze, Qiuzi, Kiupa, Kiao, Metu, Melam, Tamalu, Tukiumu, Qiu, Nung, Nu-tzŭ.

Classification

Dulong belongs to the Nungish language family of the Central Tibeto-Burman branch of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the

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 family. The other two languages in the same family are Anong and Rawang.

History

Dulong/Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language cluster spoken on both sides of the China/Myanmar border just south and east of

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, Taman ...

. Within

, the people who speak the Dulong language (possibly up to 100,000 people) live in northern Kachin State, particularly along the Mae Hka (' Nmai Hka) and Mali Hka (

Mali Hka The Mali River (''Mali Hka'') is a river that originates in the hills of Kachin State, in the northern border of Myanmar. It flows approximately 320 km, when it meets with the N'Mai River and forms the Ayeyarwady River. History Constructi ...

) River valleys. In the past, they had been called 'Hkanung' or 'Nung', and have often been considered to be a subgroup of the Kachin ( Jinghpaw). Around 1950, speakers of this language in Myanmar began a movement to use the name /rəwɑŋ/ (spelled 'Rvwang' in the Rawang orthographies) to represent all of its speakers. The speakers in China, though, continue to use the name 'Dulong'.

Geographic distribution

There are 14,000 (2,000 census) people speaking in two dialects: 8,500 in

Nu River , ''Mae Nam Salawin'' ( , name_etymology = , image = Sweet_View_of_Salween_River_in_Tang_Yan_Township,_Shan_State,_Myanmar.jpg , image_size = , image_caption = Salween River in Shan State, Myanmar , map ...

dialect, and 5,500 in Dulong River dialect. The locations of Dulong are

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the C ...

province ( Gongshan Dulong-Nu autonomous county), Xizang Autonomous Region ( Chayu (Zayü) county, Chawalong Town), and Bingzhongluo. In the past, the Dulong River was known as the Kiu (Qiu) river, and the Dulong people were known as the Kiu (Qiu), Kiutze (Qiuzi), Kiupa, or Kiao.

Dialects

Dulong has two dialects: Dulong River (Central Dulongjiang, Derung River, Northern Dulongjiang, Southern Dulongjiang), and

(Nujiang Dulong). Dialects reportedly inherently intelligible (Thurgood and LaPolla 2003). Other possible dialect names are Melam, Metu, Tamalu, and Tukiumu.

Phonology

Consonants

Dulong has twenty-four initial consonants at six points of articulation, plus the

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s /pr, br, mr, kr, xr, gr, pl, bl, ml, kl, gl/ in initial position; only the consonants /p, t, ʔ, k, n, m, ŋ, r, l/ occur in final position.

Vowels

Dulong has seven vowels, /i, ε, ə, ɑ, ɔ, ɯ, u/, and three diphthongs, /əi, ɑi, ɯi/, which only appear in open syllables.

Tones

Dulong has 3 tones: high level, high falling, and low falling. In the Dulong language, tone has the role of differentiating the meaning of a few words, with about 8% words (out of about 4000) completely relying on tones to distinguish them.

Grammar

Words can be formed by prefixation, suffixation, or

compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...

. Word classes include nouns, defined by the ability to appear with a numeral classifier; verbs, defined by the ability to appear with negation and the person and tense marking; postpositions, which are enclitic to NPs, numerals, and classifiers. Adjectives are a subset of stative verbs for which reduplication means intensification or adverbialization rather than the perfective aspect (reduplication with nouns has a distributive meaning, ‘every’). Adjectives can be used as

predicates Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, ...

or can appear nominalized in a copula clause. The grammar of the language is documented extensively by Perlin (2019).

Verb conjugation

Derung verbs inflect fusionally for person and number and

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

ly otherwise. Verbal conjugation uses a mix of affixes, a direct-inverse person-marking hierarchy,

apophony In linguistics, apophony (also known as ablaut, (vowel) gradation, (vowel) mutation, alternation, internal modification, stem modification, stem alternation, replacive morphology, stem mutation, internal inflection etc.) is any alternation wit ...

, and tone changes.

Intransitive verbs

Intransitive verbs are conjugated to agree with the subject in person and number. The first-person plural form is formed via vowel ablaut, primarily characterized by the lengthening of the root vowel. If the root vowel is the schwa , the schwa is replaced with . If the root ends in , these vowels are further converted into long diphthongs .

Transitive verbs

Transitive verbs in Derung may agree with both agent and object in three grammatical persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd) and three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, and plural). The persons are ranked in a direct-inverse hierarchy, with the first person ranking above the second person, and the second person itself ranking above the third person. If this hierarchy is violated, the marked scenario prefix is prefixed. However, second-person agents are also marked with regardless of the hierarchy.

Vocabulary

Lexical similarity In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...

: 74% with Matwang dialect of Rawang.

References

External links

* Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition
'' Dallas, Texas: SIL International. * Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin. 2017.
Glottolog 3.0.
' Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. *
Numeral Systems of the World's Languages
'.
''Drung at The Endangered Language Project.''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Derung Language Nungish languages Languages of China