"Living fossil languages" of southern China: Why study language diversity?

1. A Special Thank You

A huge thanks to everyone who has supported my project! I have just booked my plane tickets to Kunming, China, and will be in Yunnan Province, China between this mid-April and mid-May. Every bit has gone a long way, and I will be especially excited to turn your donations into real results and usable data for everybody!

I am currently preparing elicitation word lists, and will post the results online for the public on my Academia.edu page.

2. Why Study Language Diversity?

As with plant and animal species, languages are also highly diverse especially in tropical and subtropical regions, with many archaic and divergent varieties highly endangered. A good analogy would be that words are like genes, and languages are like animal species. If we compare basic vocabulary words from various languages, we can see that they cluster into various groups based on how similar the words are to each other. By comparing basic vocabulary words and sometimes even grammatical features shared in common, we can work out phylogenetic trees ("family trees") of language relationships, just as we can work out phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees of animal species from shared genes and physical features. The branch of linguistics (the scientific study of languages) that deals with historical relationships among languages is called historical linguistics.

For example, here is a tree of Tai language varieties from Joe Pittayaporn's 2009 Ph.D. dissertation The Phonology of Proto-Tai. Thai and Lao are in node Q. The most genetic diversity is in Guangxi Province, China, and thus that is where the homeland of Proto-Tai, the hypothetical ancestor of all the Tai languages, is most likely to have been located. This also confirms historical records that Tai peoples had been constantly expanding towards the southwest since around 1,500 years ago.

 

Or, here is a fancier computationally generated network that takes borrowings (horizontal transmissions) into account as well. This is a network of Tai languages from Prof. Jerold Edmondson's handout presented at the ICSTLL 46 conference at Dartmouth College in 2013. This might look really familiar to some of you biologists. That's because this method was actually originally used in evolutionary biology and genetics!

 

Then once we put the evolutionary trees together with geographical data, we can infer dispersal and migration routes. Uncovering lost stories about human migration and prehistory -- the lost stories of our ancestors -- is what makes historical linguistics so fascinating and rewarding!

Historical linguistics nicely complements human genetics, archaeology, and ethnology. All four branches of knowledge can tell us something about the human past that the other can't. By putting all these different types of knowledge together, we can get a much more complete picture of the human past.

The map below illustrates my theory that the Tai-Kadai (also called Kra-Dai) languages had dispersed via the Pearl River drainage basin, which is highlighted in yellow. Each of the four primary branches (Tai, Kam-Sui, Hlai, Kra) is coded in a different color. In fact, until about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, most of what is now China had been entirely occupied by non-Chinese-speaking peoples.

 

But to come with up these trees and networks, a lot of data collection and analysis is needed. To do that, linguists need to browse through archives, compile databases, and of course, do fieldwork when necessary. Linguistic fieldwork is currently funded primarily by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. http://www.hrelp.org/ However, funding is limited and official affiliation with an institution is also needed, which I currently don't have. And, most of the languages in the world are going extinct very, very fast, a parallel that we unfortunately see in the world's rapidly shrinking biodiversity as well.

3. Researching the Mysterious Kathu Language

Thanks to your support, I will be especially looking forward to collecting data from Kathu, which is a "living fossil" language. Kathu is to Lolo-Burmese languages as coelacanth are to fish, platypuses are to mammals, and gingkos are to trees.

Kathu is spoken by a few thousand people in Guangnan County, Yunnan Province, China. They are classified as ethnic Yi by the Chinese government, and are locally referred to as the White Yi.

As a "living fossil," Kathu preserves many consonant clusters such as kl-, ml-, and pl- that are found in very few living Tibeto-Burman languages today. For example, the Kathu word for monkey is "mleung" [mlɯŋ33]. The only other living Tibeto-Burman language that preserves this initial cluster for 'monkey' is the archaic Intha dialect of Shan State, Burma, which has mrok / mlok.

In many ways, Kathu is highly unlike all its surrounding languages, which makes it all the more mysterious. For example, the word for dog is "khli", which is NOT found in any living languages of China today, but is only also found in ... surprisingly, the Kiranti languages of eastern Nepal! Some Kathu words have parallels not with languages of China, but rather with languages much further to the west of China, such as the Digaro and Naga languages of NE India.

Thus, I'm thinking that Kathu might have originally been a "missing branch" of Sino-Tibetan that had over time borrowed heavily from the much more widely spoken Lolo-Burmese languages of Yunnan. But to test this idea, I would need to collect more data (audio recordings of more vocabulary words that have not been documented) in the field.

Below: Location of Kathu relative to other recently discovered languages in the China-Vietnam border region.