The name Gyalrong is an abbreviation of Tibetan ཤར་རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང, shar rgyal-mo tsha-ba rong , "the hot valleys of the queen", to which the queen being
Mount Murdo (in Tibetan, dmu-rdo).[3][4] Mount Murdo is in the historical region of
Kham, now mostly located inside
Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in
Sichuan. This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎 or 嘉荣, jiāróng. It is pronounced [rɟɑroŋ] by speakers of
Situ. It is a place-name and is not used by the people to designate their own language. The autonym is pronounced [kəru] in Situ and [kɯrɯ] in
Japhug. The Gyalrong people are the descendants of former Tibetan warriors at the border, where they settled as time went by.[5]
Situ has more than 100,000 speakers throughout a widespread area, while the other three languages, all spoken in
Barkam, have fewer than 10,000 speakers each.[7] They are all
tonal except for
Japhug.
Most early studies on Gyalrong languages (Jin 1949, Nagano 1984, Lin 1993) focused on various dialects of Situ, and the three other languages were not studied in detail until the last decade of the 20th century.
The differences between the four languages are presented here in a table of cognates. The data from Situ is taken from Huang and Sun 2002, the Japhug and Showu data from
Jacques (2004, 2008) and the Tshobdun data from Sun (1998, 2006).
Gyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features such as
inverse marking (Sun and Shi 2002, Jacques 2010), ideophones (Sun 2004, Jacques 2008), and verbal stem alternations (Sun 2000, 2004, Jacques 2004, 2008). See
Situ language for an example of the latter.
Demographics
Gates (2012: 102–106)[8] lists the following demographic information for 5 rGyalrong languages. Altogether, there are about 85,000 speakers for all 5 languages combined.
In contrast to much of Sino-Tibetan, Gyalrong languages have a complex morphology; Japhug is
polysynthetic. They tend to be prefixing, with Japhug being strongly so, with nine possible slots in its prefix chain. The Gyalrong verb distinguishes singular, dual, and plural numbers. While some parts of the Gyalrong prefix template are likely quite old, at least four slots in the prefix chain have been recently innovated.[9]
Syntactically, Gyalrong languages have SOV basic word order, and have been so for quite a while, Jacques argues. This combination of SOV word order with prefixing tendencies is typologically quite rare, although it is found also in
Ket and various
Athabaskan languages.[9]
^
abJacques, Guillaume (2013). "Harmonization and Disharmonization of Affix Ordering and Basic Word Order". Linguistic Typology. 17 (2): 187–215.
doi:
10.1515/lity-2013-0009.
S2CID55555480.
Jacques, Guillaume (2012).
"Argument Demotion in Japhug Rgyalrong". In Authier, Gilles; Haude, Katharina (eds.). Ergativity, Valency and Voice. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 199–225.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心 (2006). "Jiāróngyǔ dòngcí de pàishēng xíngtài" 嘉戎語動詞的派生形態. Mínzú yǔwén 民族語文 (in Chinese). 2006 (4): 3–14.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心 (2006).
"Cǎodēng Jiāróngyǔ de guānxì jù" 草登嘉戎語的關係句 [Relative Clauses in Caodeng rGyalrong] (PDF). Language & Linguistics (in Chinese). 7 (4): 905–933.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心 (2004). "Cǎodēng Jiāróngyǔ de zhuàngmàocí" 草登嘉戎語的狀貌詞 [The Ideophones in Caodeng rGyalrong]. Mínzú yǔwén 民族語文. 2004 (5): 1–11.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. (2004). "Verb-stem Variations in Showu rGyalrong". In Lin, Yin-chin; Hsu, Fang-min; Lee, Chǔn-chih; Sun, Jackson T.-S.; Yang, Hsiu-fang; Ho, Dah-an (eds.). Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor of Professor Hwang-Cherng Gong on His Seventieth Birthday. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. pp. 269–296.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. (2003). "Caodeng rGyalrong". In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). The Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 490–502.
Sun, Jackson T.-S. 孫天心 (2002). "Cǎodēng Jiāróngyǔ yǔ "rèntóng děng dì" xiāngguān de yǔfǎ xiànxiàng" 草登嘉戎語與「認同等第」相關的語法現象 [Empathy Hierarchy in Caodeng rGyalrong Grammar]. Language & Linguistics (in Chinese). 3 (1): 79–99.
Jacques, Guillaume (2005).
Jiāróngyǔ yǔ shànggǔ hànyǔ 嘉绒语与上古汉语. International Symposium on Ancient Chinese Pronunciation, Dec 2005, Shanghai, China (in Chinese).