A Phonological Sketch of a Tibetan Khams Dialect Spoken in Mingyong Village in the Yunnan bDe chen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture

Abstract

This is a preliminary report on a Tibetan Khams dialect spoken in Mingyong village (明永 Míngyǒng in Chinese; མེ་ལོང་ Me long in Tibetan) in the Dêqên County (德钦县 Déqīn xiàn; བདེ་ཆེན་རྫོང་ bDe chen rdzong) under the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (迪庆藏族自治州 Díqìng Zàngzú Zìzhìzhōu; བདེ་ཆེན་བོད་རིགས་རང་སྐྱོང་ཁུལ་ bDe chen Bod rigs rang skyong khul) , in the northwestern part of Yunnan province, in southwest China. This is the southeastern-most area where Tibetan Khams dialects are spoken. Several other nationalities, e.g. Naxi and Lisu, who speak Tibeto-Burman languages, also inhabit this district. Recently a Japanese Scholar SUZUKI Hiroyuki has been carrying out active research on the Khams dialects distributed from the Diqing to the Shangri-La district where is a county-level city as an administrative unit. He classifies the Khams dialects of this area into two big groups: Shanggri-La and Derong- Deqing. The Mingyong village belongs to the dialect subgroup spoken on the west side of the Yunling mountain range (云岭山脉 Yúnlín shānmài ) , which is under the Derong- Deqing group, as classified by Suzuki. This subgroup shares common features, but also has quite a few differences among their speech from village to village. For example, Suzuki (2010) describes phonological features of the Chalitong dialect (查里通方言 Chálǐtōng fāngyán) in detail, which is one of the dialects belonging to the subgroup spoken on the west side of the Yunling mountain range. The speakers in Mingyong village consider that they belong to the district where the Chalitong dialect is spoken, and their own speech is very similar to the Chalitong dialect. But actually there are obvious differences between Mingyong and Chalitong in their phonology, lexicon, and syntax. Although Mingyong phonology and phonological correspondences to the Written Tibetan are very close to Chalitong, some words are quite different, typically in the pronominal system. And they also have quite a few colloquial words which do not correspond to anything in Written Tibetan.