Johnson Eric C. A lexical and phonological comparison of the central Taic languages of Wenshan prefecture, China

Dallas: SIL International, 2011. — tables; 170 p. In cooperation with: 王明富 Mingfu Wang, Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous prefecture Minority affairs commission Zhuang studies association.Wenshan Zhuang and Miao autonomous Pprefecture in China’s Yunnan province is home to over a million members of the official Zhuang nationality. Over half of these speak language varieties classified into the central branch of Tai languages. The aim of the present work is to analyze wordlist data from the several central Taic Zhuang languages of Wenshan prefecture from a historical and comparative perspective in order to identify phonological distinctives explaining the observed levels of mutual intelligibility among these lexically similar languages and also to consider ramifications for spelling conventions using the official Zhuang orthography. The data analyzed in this paper results from sociolinguistic field research conducted by the author from 2005 to 2007, as well as previously published sources.In the case of this survey, all of the Zhuang languages of China demonstrate a fairly large percentage of cognate vocabulary. Although the central Taic Zhuang languages (that is, so-called southern Zhuang dialects) reportedly have more lexical variation than the northern Taic Zhuang languages (northern Zhuang dialects), among central Taic languages in China there is an average lexical similarity of around 70% among central Taic Zhuang languages in China, according to Wei and Qin (1980), and on average 65% shared vocabulary with the northern Taic varieties, after removing recent Chinese loanwords. Wei and Qin state that the Dai Zhuang and Nong Zhuang languages share 64% of the core vocabulary, excluding recent Chinese loans. Prior to the fieldwork stage of our research, we independently obtained similar results by calculating lexical similarity percentages for the subset of the data presented in Zhang et al. (1999) that were included in our own our wordlist.