Category: Borderlands

Keeping a minority language alive – Eveline Chao

In 2015, linguist Ross Perlin helped bring something utterly novel into the world: the very first book (as far as he knows) that had ever been written or published in a certain language. The language was Trung, spoken by fewer than 7,000 people in a river valley of Yunnan Province, close to the border with Burma and Tibet. The book was a Trung-Chinese-English dictionary, of which a modest number were printed and distributed locally within the 60-mile-wide area of China where Trung speakers live. The dictionary is also available online.

Together with three Trung collaborators, Perlin began compiling the dictionary in 2009. “Working first in Chinese and then haltingly in Trung, I recorded ghost stories and folksongs, studied rituals and conversations, and teased apart fine points of grammar,” Perlin wrote of the experience in Harper’s. His work with Trung stems from a broad interest in endangered languages that began in 2003, after Perlin heard Sun Hongkai, China’s most distinguished linguist, speak at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing about China’s great diversity of languages – and the fact that many are disappearing. Perlin is now the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, an advocacy organization that helps New York’s immigrant and refugee communities keep their languages alive.

Adapting traditions in 21st century China – Stevan Harrell

The Sani people, an Yi group who live in the hills east of Kunming, have faced the puzzle of modernity longer than most. Many were part of a utopian Catholic experiment started by Père Paul Vial in 1887. Vial wanted them to be modern, educated and Catholic, while still being Sani. He built churches, translated scripture into Sani, published a Sani-French dictionary and purchased land for agricultural improvement projects. He also fought fiercely for Sani autonomy and against what he saw as their oppression by Han Chinese landlords and officials. About a third of the Sani population became Catholic by the time Vial died in 1917, and many remain Catholic to this day.

Yi languages and scripts – Stevan Harrell

When I was planning to begin field research among minority groups in Southwest China, I looked for a group that was not much written about in English, but whose language was fairly convenient to study. I chose the Nuosu, a group that is part of the larger ethnic classification of Yi, mostly because I was able to get hold of a textbook and some conversation tapes. When people outside China hear that I can speak the Nuosu language, their first two questions are almost always: “How close is it to Mandarin (or to Chinese)?” and “does it have tones?”

Both Yi and Chinese are families of closely related languages (sometimes referred to as varieties), and both in turn are branches of the larger Sino-Tibetan family, which includes over 400 languages spoken in China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. To put it another way, Yi and Chinese are as closely related as any two distant Indo-European languages, like English and Bengali, or German and Dari. In other words, not much.

Stevan Harrell introduces the Yi of southwest China

There are more Yi people than there are Norwegians, Swiss, Libyans or Tibetans – around nine million. They have one of the world’s only independent writing systems, derived from neither Phoenician nor Chinese. They are the only people who make soup bowls out of water buffalo hide (they also used to use it to make armor and helmets), and they do some of the world’s most unique and exquisite needlework. They are enshrined in Chinese Communist Party history for having helped Mao on the Long March in 1936, only to rebel against land reforms in 1956-57. They helped Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt shoot the first giant panda to be brought to the US for a taxidermy exhibit. They sacrifice animals on just about all special occasions, but they don’t eat the meat of horses, bears, dogs, monkeys or frogs, because they are all animals with claws (horses have dewclaws) and thus related closely to humans. Some 19th and early 20th century European missionaries thought they might be the Lost Tribes of Israel.  

Why might you never have heard of them?