E (), also known as Ei, Wuse, or Wusehua, ( zh, t=五色話, s=五色话, p=Wǔsèhuà, l=colored language) is a Tai– Chinese

mixed language A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language or fusion language, is a type of contact language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. ...

spoken primarily in Rongshui Miao Autonomous County,

Guangxi Guangxi,; officially the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People's Republic of China, located in South China and bordering Vietnam (Hà Giang Province, Hà Giang, Cao Bằn ...

, China. It contains features of both Tai and Chinese varieties, generally adopting Chinese vocabulary into Tai grammar. E is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

—distinguishing between seven tones—and contains a few rare phonemes:

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

versions Version may refer to: Computing * Software version, a set of numbers that identify a unique evolution of a computer program * VERSION (CONFIG.SYS directive), a configuration directive in FreeDOS Music * Cover version * Dub version * Remix * Versi ...

of the more common

nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majo ...

s and

alveolar lateral approximant The voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral ...

Etymology

The E language's unusual name, which is also an autonym, derives from the pinyin transliteration of the rare Mandarin syllable zh, t=誒, s=诶, p=ê̄, labels=no (), which conventionally denotes an expression of affirmation (and is distinguished from ''ē'' in pinyin by the use of a

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

). The language's speakers also refer to their language as ''Kjang E'' . ''Wusehua'' is a derogatory name for E.

Geographical distribution

In 1992, E was spoken by about 30,000 people, but by 2008 this number had dwindled to 9,000. Gao (2016) reported that there were 5,000 speakers of E.Gao, Huan 高欢. 2016. ''Guangxi Ronghsui Aihua yanjiu'' 广西融水诶话研究. Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Academy Press 中国社会科学出版社. Most E speakers are classified as Zhuang by the Chinese government. E speakers live in Rongshui Miao Autonomous County and border areas of Luocheng Mulao Autonomous County in

. In Rongshui County, the three main villages inhabited by E speakers are Xiatan 下覃村, Simo 四莫村, and Xinglong 兴隆村 in Yongle Township 永乐乡. E speakers' most commonly spoken other languages are the Liujia dialect (六甲话) of

Yue Chinese Yue () is a branch of the Sinitic languages primarily spoken in Northern and southern China, Southern China, particularly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi (collectively known as Liangguang). The term Cantonese is often used to refer ...

and the Guiliu variant of Southwestern Mandarin.

Phonology

E's consonant and vowel inventories are mostly similar to those of its parent languages. However, it contains a few unusual consonants: the voiceless nasal consonants , , , and the voiceless alveolar lateral approximant . All are

versions of consonants that, in most languages, are always

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...

. E allows

syllabic consonant A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...

s and

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s. Like most Southeast Asian languages, including Tai and the

varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...

, E is tonal. The language is described as having seven tones, with the seventh varying allophonically with the

length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with Dimension (physical quantity), dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a Base unit (measurement), base unit for length is chosen, ...

of the vowel it is attached to. With numbers ranging from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest tone and 5 the highest, the contours of the various tones in E are as follows.

Grammar and lexicon

E is usually classified as a

deriving ultimately from the Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan families, which both inhabit southern

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

and

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...

. Some non-Chinese scholars, however, consider it a Tai-Kadai language with Chinese influence. Whatever its classification, the grammar resembles that of the Tai branch of Tai-Kadai. E's grammatical features appear to be a mix of Northern Zhuang, Mulam, and Kam. The Caolan language of Vietnam also displays many similarities with E. The vocabulary, however, is mostly Chinese, based on Guiliu and the Tuguai variant of Pinghua. Out of the 2,000 most commonly used E words, only about 200 are of Tai-Kadai origin. E also inherits elements of these Chinese dialects'

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

and compound word formation. E morphology is primarily analytic, with concepts such as

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation (mathematics), operation that takes a Proposition (mathematics), proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P, P^\prime or \over ...

expressed with auxiliary words (''pat⁶'', ''m²'') and no pronominal agreement. In its pronouns, E distinguishes for

person A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...

between first, second, and third; in

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

between singular and plural; and, in the case of the first-person plural, between inclusive and exclusive ''we''. E does not, however, make distinctions for

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

Notes

References

* * Gao, Huan 高欢. 2016. ''Guangxi Ronghsui Aihua yanjiu'' 广西融水诶话研究. Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Academy Press 中国社会科学出版社. * * * * * * {{Tai-Kadai languages Analytic languages Isolating languages Languages of Guangxi Liuzhou Mixed languages Chinese-based pidgins and creoles Tai languages Tonal languages