Castro Andy, Hansen Bruce. Hongshui He Zhuang dialect intelligibility survey

Dallas: SIL International, 2010. — maps; 110 p. In cooperation with Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Minority language commission.Our purpose in conducting this survey was to gain a better understanding of the linguistic diversity within Zhuang spoken in the Hongshui He region. We sought to achieve this purpose by asking the following research questions: what are the groupings of the different varieties of Zhuang in the Hongshui He region based on intelligibility? What places would serve best as reference varieties for each of these groupings? The concept of reference varieties is vital to understanding this survey, so a word of explanation is in order. Around the world it is common for languages to be slightly different from one village to the next, but not so different that understanding is impeded. Consider, however, a classic riverine dialect chain where village A at the headwaters has not the least difficulty communicating with the next village downstream, village B. Village B communicates equally well with village C, and so on through to village Z at the mouth of the river. But if speakers from village A and village Z get together, they find they cannot communicate using the speech of their local villages. Now the question presents itself: what is the minimum number of varieties necessary so that all speakers along this chain adequately understand one of the selected varieties? It could be that a government radio station would conduct a survey and find that the speech of village M is so widely understood that it covers the whole chain from end to end. In that case, they might choose the speech of village M as a reference variety, and prepare programming using speakers from that village. On the other hand, it could be that just one reference variety won't get the job done. Perhaps a survey finds that village E speaks a really odd variety that nobody else understands. This one is considered an outlier. Of the remaining 25 villages, it is found that they can be grouped as follows: village G speakers are understood by people from villages A, B, C, D, F, H and I; village P speakers are understood by villages H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, Q, R and S; and village W speakers are understood by villages S, T, U, V, X, Y, Z. There is overlap, of course, nevertheless it still takes at least three varieties to cover everybody, if we disregard the outlier. Another way of thinking of the concept is to imagine grouping speech varieties by drawing circles. The reference variety for each group would be the speech from the place that is chosen because everybody else in that circle can understand it. Typically, a written reference variety would have greater extensibility than a spoken reference variety. In this survey we are investigating spoken Zhuang because there are relatively few Zhuang people who can read and write in Zhuang.