Colloquium Presentation Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica November 18, 2019

How to Subgroup a New Tibetic Lect? The Case of Sastod (Khrochu County, )

Jackson T.-S. Sun

ABSTRACT The amazing internal diversity of Tibetic languages in and beyond has been increasingly appreciated (Tournadre 2014; J. Sun 2014). One hotbed of Tibetic heterogeneity is Khrochu (黑水) County in northern Sichuan where, in addition to Rgyalrong and Rma (Qiang), several Tibetic varieties practically unknown to science are also spoken. Some of these clearly merit separate language (or language-like) status, contra the claim in the Chinese sources that the spoken in this county is just “a dialect of ” (Anonymous 1993: 609). My continued efforts in recent years to document the languages of Khrochu have brought to light multiple Tibetic forms, gradually unveiling a more realistic picture of the linguistic panorama of the target area. I have already demonstrated that two of these, Takhog and Eastern Chunag, are separate Tibetic languages on lexical, phonological, and grammatical evidence (Sun 2018; 2019). This study focuses on yet another Tibetic cluster spoken in four villages of Sastod (沙石多) Township in southwestern Khrochu. Despite its geographical adjacency to Amdo-speaking Rkakhog (紅原) and Rngaba (阿壩) counties, Sastod is not directly intelligible to speakers of mainstream Amdo, owing to its peculiar vocabulary, phonology, and grammar. Selected linguistic traits of Sastod that distinguish it from Amdo and underpin its distinctive position in Tibetic will be presented in this talk, drawing on primary data collected from Mogpa (馬河壩) Village.

References

Anonymous, 1993. Hēishǔi xìanzhɪ̀ (Gazetteer of Heishui County) [in Chinese]. Chengdu: Nationality Press. Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2014. (ed.) Phonological Profiles of Little-Studied Tibetic Varieties (Language and Linguistics Monograph Series). Taipei: Academia Sinica. Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2018. Identifying Tibetic subgroups: A case in Khrochu (Sichuan). Keynote address presented at the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Kyoto, September 25-September 28. Sun, Jackson T.-S. 2019. Understanding Tibetic evidentials: new evidence from Sichuan. Keynote address presented at the 5th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China, Nankai University, China, August 21-23. Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. The Tibetic languages and their classification. Trans- Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area, edited by Thomas Owen-Smith and Nathan Hill, 105-130. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.