Languages

Most Yunnan languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, in four different groups: Zhuang-Dong (or Tai-Kedai), Tibeto-Burman, Miao-Yao, Chinese. In the first group the Zhuang, Dai and Buyi tongues are in the Zhuang-Dai branch and Shui is in the Dong-Shui branch.Within the Tibeto-Burman group, Tibetan is in one branch, Jingpo and Dulong are in the Jingpo branch, Pumi is in the Qiang branch and Nu and Achang belong to no particular branch. The Yi branch comprises Yi, Lisu, Naxi, Hani, Lahu and Jinuo. Within the Miao-Yao group, all the Miao dialects are in one branch, all the Yao dialects in the other. The Chinese group includes the Chinese spoken by the Hui (and of course the Han) and the Manchu spoken by a couple thousand Manchu city dwellers.

The Bai language has not been definitively placed. About one third of its vocabulary is taken from Chinese and its word order is, like Chinese, subject-verb-object. All Tibeto-Burman languages, with which it was once clas¬sified, run subject-object-verb. One language outside the Sino-Tibetan family is the Mongolian dialect in Tonghai, a member of the Ural-Altaic family. The Mon-Khmer linguistic family includes Wa, Bulang and De'ang.

Among all the larger minority nationalities each language has dialects. Yi has six, for example, and even within one dialect the variation in vocabulary, thanks to centuries of isolation, can be rather great. Local peculiarities affect all dialects of all the major Yunnan languages. Sometimes people speaking officially the same dialect have trouble understanding others of the same dialect, but a hundred kilometres away. Loan words, especially, tend to vary, depending on the identity of the nearest neighbour. Some Hani loan words are taken from the Dai, others from Chinese, others from Yi. Loan words in Jingpo or Wa tend to be taken from Dai. Lisu, Miao and Yao tend to take new words from Chinese.

Until recent decades and the spread of Chinese-style education, most minority societies were illiterate in their own languages. The better-educated were taught in Chinese, not in their own tongues. Few languages had developed alphabets and only the Dai alphabets, one in Xishuangbanna and a different one in Dehong, were for general, secular use. Other alphabets were only intelligible to religious specialists.

Tibetan has an alphabet, but for the Lhasa dialect, which is unintelligible to the Diqing Tibetans and so the alphabet is only useful to lamas who have studied in Lhasa. Government office signs are bilingual, but the average Deqing Tibetan can more likely read the Chinese than the Tibetan.

The Yi alphabet, an ancient syllabic script whose letters resemble the simplest Chinese ideographs, was intelligible only to the bimaw, the ritual specialist who was custodian of the Yi books. In recent decades, though, Yi scholars in Sichuan standardised the script, compiled a gargantuan Yi-Chinese dictionary and soon Yi-run publishing houses began putting out books in Yi. Some of these were textbooks used in experimental bilingual schools, wherein the Yi language and script are also taught. One such successful school is in Bainiuchang, in Ninglang County.

The Naxi religious specialist, the dongba, used books written in an archaic pictographic script, supplemented by marks that indicated pronunciation or grammatical elements. The pictographs did not work the same as Egyptian hieroglyphics, however. They summarised the content, serving as much as mnemonic devices as narrative.

Missionaries in the 19th and early 20th centuries devised scripts for their converts' languages, based on the Latin letters, with tones indicated sometimes by letters at the end of each syllable, sometimes by diacritical marks. The main purpose was to translate and print Christian literature in the native language. After 1949 the government employed linguists to devise scripts, again using Latin letters, for all minority languages without one.