Background e book 66 Castro Sui Dialect

1 1 General Introduction Andy Castro

1.1 Introduction and objectives

The Sui Dialect Survey was a cooperative project conducted by researchers from the Southwestern Minorities Languages and Culture Research Institute Guizhou University and the Sui Research Institute of Sandu Sui Autonomous County, Qiannan Bouyei Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province in the second half of 2011. It was carried out with the approval and assistance of the Guizhou Minorities Affairs Commission and the Guizhou Department of Education. Further data was collected by researchers from the Southwestern Minorities Languages and Culture Research Institute in cooperation with partners in Duyun city, Dushan county, Libo county all in Qiannan prefecture and Rongjiang county Qiandongnan Dong Miao Autonomous Prefecture. These partners included the Minorities Research Institute of Qiannan Normal College, Duyun municipality, the Sui Studies Association of Libo county and the Minority Affairs Bureau of Rongjiang county. The objective of the survey was to document a geographically wide-ranging and linguistically representative sample of Sui dialects and to elucidate the linguistic relationship between them. Although previous research has been carried out to this end, most notably a large-scale dialect survey conducted in 1956 SDB 1958, neither a thorough set of comparative Sui dialect data nor a comprehensive analysis of Sui dialectal differences has ever been published. The current dialect survey aims to fill this gap. In order to provide a context for the survey, the history of the Sui peoples and a historical and cultural introduction to each of the survey data points are given in chapter 2. The remainder of the work is devoted to presenting the findings of the survey. There were two main elements to the survey fieldwork: 1 collecting wordlists; and 2 conducting intelligibility tests in Recorded Text Test RTT format, using a sentence retelling method. By means of these two activities we hoped to gain an overall picture of the Sui dialect situation. Various types of analysis were applied to the wordlist data: 1 comparison of diachronic sound changes, the most widely accepted basis for subgrouping languages and dialects Campbell 2004, Huang Xing 2007, presented in chapters 3, 4 and 5; 2 lexical comparisons chapter 6; and 3 phonetic distance calculations chapter 7. The methodology and results of the intelligibility testing are presented in chapter 8. An overall summary of the survey results along with conclusions and areas for further research are given in chapter 9. Finally, the raw data which we collected on the survey can be found in the Appendices.

1.2 Background

Sui is typically classified as belonging to the Kam-Sui branch of Tai-Kadai Diller 2008a, James Wei 2011, Lewis et al., 2013. One of the greatest linguists of the last century, Li Fang-kuei, first coined the term “Kam-Sui”, including within this branch Sui, Maonan Sui’s closest relative, Kam, Mulam, Mak and Then Li Fang-kuei 1943, 1948. Sui occupies an important position in Tai-Kadai comparative research due to its relatively conservative nature, particularly in terms of its rich inventory of sounds, many of which have been lost in other Tai-Kadai languages James Wei 2008. There are various hypotheses regarding the relationship of Tai-Kadai to other language families in East and Southeast Asia. Chinese scholars typically advocate the positioning of Tai-Kadai within the Sino-Tibetan language family Luo 2008, James Wei 2011. Western scholarship generally holds that Tai- Kadai is an independent language family not genetically related to, although heavily influenced by, Sino- Tibetan. Another theory, originally proposed by Benedict 1975, holds that there is a genetic relationship between Tai-Kadai and Austronesian—the “Austro-Tai” hypothesis. This theory has been gaining wider credence in recent years. Most scholars divide Sui into three dialects: Sandong; Pandong; and Yang’an SDB 1958, Zhang Junru 1980, James Wei 2008, Stanford 2011, as shown in map 1.1. This division is mainly based on phonological and lexical similarity. SDB 1958 further divided Sandong dialect into two sub-dialects: 1 Rongjiang county; and 2 the rest. Castro 2011 proposed a slightly different alignment, with Sandong dialect comprising two other sub-dialects: 1 Southern Sui Libo county and south-eastern Sandu county; and 2 Central Sui the rest, as shown in map 1.2. He noted that the geographical delineation between the Southern and Central Sui dialect groups coincides with the division between those Sui who celebrate the Mao festival in the south and those who celebrate the Dwa festival further north. The results of the current survey support both SDB’s and Castro’s propositions, as well as elucidating the relationships between the other Sui dialects. Map 1.1. Traditional grouping of Sui dialects. Map drawn by the author, based on locations given Map 1.2. Castro’s 2011 grouping of in Zhang Junru 1980, showing Sandu, Libo and Sui dialects Rongjiang county towns and borders. Also showing “Rongjiang” sub-dialect SDB 1958 In this work we refer broadly to three Sui dialects: Sandong; Pandong; and Yang’an. We further subdivide Sandong into four “subdialects”: Central including the Sandong standard and also embracing Zhonghe and Zhouqin townships; Western a large area of the Sui heartland including Tingpai, Tangzhou, Shuilong and Hengfeng townships; Eastern broadly matching SDB’s “Rongjiang”, although including parts of eastern Sandu county; and Southern broadly matching Castro’s 2011, “Southern dialect”. In this work we often refer to these subdialects of Sandong as Central Sui, Western Sui, Eastern Sui and Southern Sui respectively. These dialect and subdialect divisions are shown on map 1.3. Map 1.3. Sui dialects and subdialects referred to in this work Central Sui as spoken in Sandong district, Sandu county, is considered the “standard dialect” Zhang Junru 1980, James Wei 2011. Central, Western and Southern Sui have a rich inventory of over 60 initials including bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular consonants and preglottalised, prenasalised, palatalised and labialised obstruents and over 50 finals including nasal and -p, -t, -k codas. 1 We provide a phonology sketch of Sandong dialect in chapter 3. Pandong and Yang’an dialects and the Eastern subdialect of Sandong have smaller phonemic inventories. They generally have fewer preglottalised initials, fewer voiceless nasals and fewer prenasalised stops. Sui has six contrastive tones on unchecked or “live” syllables i.e., open syllables or syllables closed by a sonorant and two on checked or “dead” syllables i.e., syllables closed by a stop with different pitch contours depending on the length of the vowel nucleus.

1.3 Previous research on the Sui language