Bai (language)

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Bai Bairt‧ngvrt‧zix, 白语 Báiyǔ
Spoken in:	Yunnan, China
Total speakers:	1)
Language family:	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman? Bai
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`sit (B)`
ISO 639-3:	variously: `bca` — Central Bai, Jianchuan dialect `bfs` — Southern Bai, Dali dialect `bfc` — Northern Bai, Bijiang dialect
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

The Bai language (Bai: Bairt‧ngvrt‧zix; Traditional Chinese: 白語; Simplified Chinese: 白语; Mandarin pinyin: Báiyǔ ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tonal language with eight tones and a rather rich set of vowels. The vowels of Bai have a tense-lax (creaky voice vs. normal voice) phonemic opposition which is often found in the languages of southeast Asia. Bai is mainly a spoken language, but there exists a small amount of traditional literature written with Chinese characters, as well as a number of recent publications printed with a recently standardized system of romanisation.

[edit] Classification

Traditionally, Bai was said to be a Tibeto-Burman language, though this classification isn't clear and it could be part of an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. A large portion of the Bai lexicon (about 70%) appears to be Chinese, with many words being similar to modern S.W.Mandarin or slightly earlier stages. However, some of the oldest, most basic vocabulary resembles forms of Chinese reflecting phonological developments well over 2,000 years old, so some scholars have suggested that Bai may be a very early off-shoot from Old Chinese.^[1]

Thanks to phonetic changes over time, it is possible to identify two distinct periods of borrowing. Once words from these borrowings are accounted for, there are few exclusively Bai words left. This is why some linguists exclude it from classification as a member of Tibeto-Burman.

Bai has a basic syntactic order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), like Chinese. Some remnant "irregular" phrases with SOV could be found in Bai and are thought to be the Tibeto-Burman substratum of ancient Bai.

[edit] References

Lee Yeon-ju & Sagart, L. 1998 The strata of Bai, paper presented 31th ICSTLL, University of Lund, Sweden, Sep. 30 – Oct. 4, 1998.
Matisoff, J. A. 2001 On the genetic position of Bai within Tibeto-Burman. Paper presented at 34th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan languages and linguistics, Yunnan minzu xueyuan.
Starostin, Sergej (1995) “The historical position of Bai”. In: Moskovskij Lingvisticheskij Zhurnal 1: 174-190. Moscow, 1995.
Wang, Feng. On the genetic position of the Bai language. Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale. Vol. 34 (1): 101–127. Paris, 2005.
Wang, Feng. Comparison of languages in contact: the distillation method and the case of Bai. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series B: Frontiers in Linguistics III. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2006.
Wiersma, Grace. 1990. Investigation of the Bai (Minjia) language along historical lines, UC Berkeley: PhD thesis.