Southern Qiang language
Southern Qiang language
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Southern Qiang language

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Southern Qiang language

Southern Qiang is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Qiangic branch spoken by approximately 81,300 people along the Minjiang (Chinese: 岷江) river in Sichuan Province, China.

Southern Qiang dialects preserve archaic pronoun flexions, while they have disappeared in Northern Qiang. Unlike its close relative Northern Qiang, Southern Qiang is a tonal language.

Southern Qiang is spoken in Li County (in Taoping 桃坪, etc.), Wenchuan County (in Longxi 龙溪, Luobozhai 萝卜寨, Miansi 绵虒, etc.), and parts of Mao County. It consists of seven dialects: Dajishan, Taoping, Longxi, Mianchi, Heihu, Sanlong, and Jiaochang, which are greatly divergent and are not mutually intelligible.

Names seen in the older literature for Southern Qiang dialects include Lofuchai (Lophuchai, Lopu Chai) for Luobozhai (萝卜寨); Wagsod (Wa-gsod, Waszu) for Wasi (瓦寺) in modern-day Heping (河坪); and Outside/Outer Mantse (Man-tzŭ), likely from a term for "barbarians", from Chinese: 蠻子; pinyin: mánzǐ or from Tibetan སྨན་རྩེ (Wylie: sman tse).

The Southern Qiang dialect of Puxi Township has been documented in detail by Huang (2007). Liu (1998) adds Sānlóng (Chinese: 三龍) and Jiàocháng (較場) as Southern subdialects.

Sims (2016) characterizes Southern Qiang as the group that innovated the use of agreement suffixes in the perfective aspect, whereas Northern Qiang retains orientational prefixes as markers. These suffixes also provided the basis for classifying individual dialects, as highlighted below in italics.

The consonants of Southern Qiang are presented in the table below:

The vowels of Southern Qiang are presented in the table below:

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