A Grammar of Guìqióng: A Language of Sichuan by Li Jiang (review)

This is a very valuable study of an underdocumented Qiangic Tibeto-Burman language of western Sichuan in southwestern China. The speakers, like most other related small groups in western Sichuan, are mostly officially classified as part of the Tibetan nationality; the author suggests a much larger population than any previous study, over 12,500 in the ethnic group, of whom nearly ten thousand are speakers of the language and the rest are able to understand but not speak; previous studies have suggested six to seven thousand speakers. One reason for the difference is that about fifteen hundred of these in two villages are officially classified as Han Chinese. However, the author also says that the language is “seriously losing its vigour” (p. 18), with those over sixty mostly monolingual, those over forty bilingual but now using mainly Chinese, and younger people having limited knowledge of the language.

The usual name for this group used in the linguistic literature, “Guìqióng,” is a Han Chinese exonym based on the autonym [gu³³tɕ^hiɐŋ⁵⁵] or [gu³³dʑ^ɦiɐŋ²¹] (p.5); this latter name has not previously appeared in the literature, and the author tentatively relates it to the word [dʑiɐŋ³³] ‘north’, as their origin story says that the group came from the north like most other Tibeto-Burman groups; the first syllable may be linked to the in-group plural suffix (pp. 82–83, misglossed there as ‘exclusive’). An earlier extensive study of the language, Song (2011), appeared as one in a series of progressively more detailed Chinese studies beginning with Sun (1983:111–25, 1991:227–30 and passim) and Huang (1992), all of which are in Chinese and are cited and discussed by Li; below, these are compared with the book under review where relevant.

Both this book and Song (2011) start with very useful introductions on the historical, geographical, and cultural background of this group (pp.1–22; Song 2011:1–36), which is unusual in grammars, but extremely relevant and useful; the book also includes a number of useful pictures. We are told that another exonym, “Yútōng,” said to be derived from Tibetan, has been used for some six hundred years; it refers to the fact that the Guìqióng are the only group in the area who wear large turbans (pp. 5–6).

The presentation of phonology (pp. 23–62) is uneven and would benefit greatly from a complete table showing the cooccurrence of initial consonants and vowels, which may also have led to a somewhat different analysis. There are very substantial phonological and lexical differences between the large and valuable vocabulary presented here (pp. 349–442) and the considerably more extensive vocabulary provided by Song (2011:230–93), as well as the smaller vocabularies of Sun (1991) and Huang (1992). These differences are in part notational, as the author chooses an idiosyncratic way of representing tones with apostrophes before or after initial consonants, while Song (2011), following other Chinese authors, uses numbers (5 for high, 1 for low), as does this review. There are numerous and profound differences in the analysis of the segmental systems as well. This is surprising, as Song and Li worked with the same main consultants on the same variety of the language.

Li (pp. 23–31) posits eight vowels i y ɛ ə ɐ u o ɔ, five of which also occur contrastively nasalized, and a very large array of diphthongs. There is a contrast between syllables with final n, syllables with final ŋ, and nasalized vowels, but there are no other final consonants. Other analyses propose much larger vowel inventories; Song (2011:41) lists fourteen monophthongs and nine nasalized vowels. Some of the differences are the result of different allophonic analyses; the additional vowels proposed by Song are e ø ɿʉ ɯ ər, most of which are treated as allophones of one of the author’s nine vowels, but some of which should not be. For example, the author...