Shaping rGyalthangic: A historical account of Yunnan Khams

Abstract

This research systematically investigates the sound change process of shared innovations concerning ‘rGyalthangic’—a group consisting of varieties including the rGyalthang subgroup and its surrounding varieties within the Sems-kyi-nyila group. In other words, we discuss diachronic features based on synchronic data using a geolinguistic method. First, we describe how to differentiate rGyalthangic from the others in Yunnan Khams and then display the principal shared innovations compared with Literary Tibetan forms. Second, we list the sound change processes according to their relative timescales. Third, we draw a linguistic map demonstrating the distribution of rGyalthangic in Yunnan and analyse how the linguistic distribution has changed.