Introduction and objectives 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