The Loloish languages, also known as Yi and occasionally Ngwi[1] or Nisoic,[2] are a family of fifty to a hundred
Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in
Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to
Burmese and its relatives. Both the Loloish and
Burmish branches are well defined, as is their superior node,
Lolo-Burmese. However, subclassification is more contentious.
SIL Ethnologue (2013 edition) estimated a total number of 9 million native speakers of Loloish ("Ngwi") languages, the largest group being the speakers of
Nuosu (Northern Yi) at 2 million speakers (2000 PRC census).[a]
Names
Loloish is the traditional name for the family in English. Some publications avoid the term under the misapprehension that Lolo is pejorative, but it is the Chinese rendition of the autonym of the
Yi people and is pejorative only in writing when it is written with a particular Chinese character (one that uses a beast, rather than a human,
radical), a practice that was prohibited by the Chinese government in the 1950s.[3]
David Bradley uses the term Ngwi, and Lama (2012) uses Nisoic. Ethnologue has adopted 'Ngwi', but Glottolog retains 'Loloish'.
Paul K. Benedict coined the term Yipho, from Chinese Yi and a common autonymic element (-po or -pho), but it never gained wide usage.
Internal classification
Bradley (2007)
Loloish was traditionally divided into a northern branch, with
Lisu and the numerous
Yi languages and a southern branch, with everything else. However, per Bradley[1] and Thurgood[4] there is also a central branch, with languages from both northern and southern. Bradley[5][6] adds a fourth, southeastern branch.
Ugong is divergent; Bradley (1997) places it with the
Burmish languages. The
Tujia language is difficult to classify due to divergent vocabulary. Other unclassified Loloish languages are
Gokhy (Gɔkhý),
Lopi and
Ache.
Lama (2012)
Lama (2012) classified 36 Lolo–Burmese languages based on a computational analysis of shared phonological and
lexical innovations. He finds the
Mondzish languages to be a separate branch of Lolo-Burmese, which Lama considers to have split off before
Burmish did. The rest of the Loloish languages are as follows:
The Nisoish, Lisoish, and Kazhuoish clusters are closely related, forming a clade ("Ni-Li-Ka") at about the same level as the other five branches of Loloish. Lama's Naxish clade has been classified as
Qiangic rather than Loloish by
Guillaume Jacques and Alexis Michaud[9] (see
Qiangic languages).
A
Lawoish (Lawu) branch has also been recently proposed.[10]
Satterthwaite-Phillips' (2011) computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages does support the inclusion of
Naxish (Naic) within Lolo-Burmese, but recognizes Lahoish and Nusoish as coherent language groups that form independent branches of Loloish.[11]
Bradley, David (2002). "The subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman". In Beckwith, Christopher & Blezer, Henk (eds.). Medieval Tibeto-Burman languages. International Association for Tibetan Studies Proceedings 9 (2000) and Brill Tibetan Studies Library 2. Leiden: Brill. pp. 73–112.
Bradley, David (2007). "East and Southeast Asia". In Moseley, Christopher (ed.). Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. London & New York: Routledge. pp. 349–424.
Satterthwaite-Phillips, Damian (2011). Phylogenetic inference of the Tibeto-Burman languages or On the usefulness of lexicostatistics (and "Megalo"-comparison) for the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman (Ph.D. dissertation). Stanford University.
Thurgood, Graham (2003), "A subgrouping of the Sino-Tibetan languages", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.), Sino-Tibetan Languages, London: Routledge, pp. 3–21,
ISBN978-0-7007-1129-1.
Driem, George van (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Leiden: Brill.