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
A significant amount of descriptive work on Sui has been published to date, although a lot of work remains to be done. The earliest documentation of the Sui language was made by the renowned Tai-
Kadai linguist Li Fang-kuei. In 1942 Li spent some time in “Ngam” and “Li” villages known in Chinese as Shuili and Shuiyan, in Libo county and he later published several annotated Sui texts which he
gathered there Li Fang-kuei 1977b. He collected a vast amount of Sui vocabulary which was published posthumously in the form of a “Sui-Chinese-English glossary” Li Fang-kuei 2008, along with some
vocabulary that he collected from “Pyo” village then Shuipo township, Libo county, now Hengfeng township in Sandu county and Rongjiang county. His observations of Sui initials and tone Li Fang-kuei
1948 played a crucial role in his reconstruction of Proto-Tai-Kadai Li Fang-kuei 1977a, the first
1
The “alveolar” series referred to in this paper is equivalent to Li Fang-kuei’s 1965 “dental” series. Edmondson et al., 2004:51 analysed these sounds as “denti-alveolars” because he found that there is a wide post-dental contact
area. The authors have noticed that for some Sui speakers there is no dental contact at all. Some speakers recorded for this study even articulate prenasalised “alveolar” stops with the tongue slightly retroflexed, touching the back of
the alveolar ridge.
published reconstruction in this language family. Li was also the first to describe Mak and to delineate the Kam-Sui branch of Tai-Kadai Li Fang-kuei 1943.
In addition to Li’s glossary which, being based on Li-Ngam, largely reflects Southern Sui pronunciation and lexicon, two other Sui glossaries or “dictionaries” have been published. The most
comprehensive to date, entitled “Chinese-Sui dictionary”, was collated by Zeng Xiaoyu and Yao Fuxiang Zeng and Yao 1996. Although it is primarily based on standard Sui as spoken in Sandong township, it
is heavily influenced by Yao’s own dialect, that of Shuilao village in present-day Shuiyao township, Libo county, a variety of Southern Sui. In collaboration with Mahidol University, James Wei and Jerold
Edmondson published a quadrilingual “Sui-Chinese-Thai-English dictionary” Burusphat et al., 2003. This is based on Wei’s own variety of Sandong dialect from Miaocao village, Dahe township, although it
includes unmarked regional pronunciations too.
2
The most comprehensive general description of the Sui language published to date is the “Sketch of the Sui language”, written by another well-known expert in Tai-Kadai languages, Zhang Junru 1980.
This work includes a small section on Sui dialects focussing on the lexical and phonetic features of Pandong and Yang’an dialects. Other descriptions of Sui and its dialects can be found in Xia 1988, 1989,
1992, and James Wei 2008, 2011. No comprehensive, detailed analyses of Sui morphology, syntax or discourse have yet been published
In terms of historical comparative work in the Kam-Sui branch, the greatest contributions have been made by Li Fang-kuei 1948, 1977a, Thurgood 1988, Ferlus 1990, 1996 and Zeng 1994, 2004.
These works, along with others, are discussed in more detail in chapters 3 to 5. Generally, a lack of good data for Sui, Kam, Mulam and Maonan has held back comparative work in this branch. Zeng 1994,
2004, 2010 has made significant contributions to understanding the historical relationship between Chinese and Sui. These two languages have been in extended contact over many centuries, if not
millennia, and a good grasp of historical developments in the Sinitic branch is crucial for Sui comparative work. For this, researchers can look to scholars such as Baxter, Sagart, Pulleyblank, Li Fang-
kuei, Wang Li, Zhengzhang Shangfang and Pan Wuyun.
Dialectology is a small but growing field of linguistics. A key reference work for understanding the history of this field is Chambers and Trudgill’s Dialectology 1998. In the specific subfield of
dialectometry, Nerbonne 2000 and Gooskens 2006, 2007, 2013 and their team at the University of Groningen have made valuable contributions, in particular regarding the use of the Levenshtein distance
algorithm Levenshtein 1965 to compute phonetic similarity between dialects. Tang and van Heuven 2007, 2009, 2011 developed an innovative method for testing functional intelligibility, correlating
their results with more traditional phonemic comparisons. These discoveries, along with related dialectometric research, are discussed in more detail in chapter 8.
The greatest contributions to understanding Sui dialectology specifically have been made by James Stanford 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011. Stanford has made significant inroads into uncovering the
relationship between clan identity and dialectal speech patterns. His work has partly been informed by the unpublished results of a “Sui Dialect Survey” carried out in the 1950s SDB 1958, the only
manuscript to describe Sui dialect differences in detail. Castro 2011 was the first to posit a “Southern Sui” dialect based on a historical comparison as well as on lexical and cultural factors. Nevertheless, a
sweeping, comprehensive picture of the overall Sui dialect situation has never been published. This work seeks to address this deficiency.
Descriptions of Sui culture and publications of traditional Sui songs and shamanic books using Lee Sui character script are too numerous to list here. Probably the most comprehensive description of Sui
history and culture that has been published was written by the eminent Sui scholar Pan Chaolin, along with Wei Zonglin 2004. In addition to Pan’s work, Wang Pinkui and Mo Junqing 1981 and Liang Min
2008 have made contributions to understanding the migratory history of the Sui people. Sagart et al., 2005 and Liang and Zhang 1996, 2006 are good starting points for learning about the various
theories regarding the Tai-Kadai peoples and the peopling of Southeast Asia. Wei Shifang 2007, Lu
2
Upon initial inspection this appears to be a variety of Western Sui.
Chun 2010 and Kamil Burkiewicz 2012 have all produced glossaries of Lee Sui characters, the latter being the first to include English explanations.
1.4 Methodology
