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A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Dejing Zhuang Dialect Area

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A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Dejing Zhuang Dialect Area DigitalResources Electronic Survey Report 2012-036 ® A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Dejing Zhuang Dialect Area Eric M. Jackson Emily H.S. Jackson Shuh Huey Lau A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Dejing Zhuang Dialect Area Eric M. Jackson, Emily H.S. Jackson, Shuh Huey Lau SIL International ® In cooperation with the Guangxi Minorities Language and Scripts Work Commission 2012 SIL Electronic Survey Report 2012-036, October 2012 Copyright © 2012 Eric M. Jackson, Emily H.S. Jackson, Shuh Huey Lau, and SIL International ® All rights reserved Contents Acknowledgements Abstract 1 Dejing Zhuang: An introduction 1.1 Piecing together the ethnolinguistic situation 1.2 Demographics and non-linguistic background 1.2.1 Geography 1.2.2 Ethnicity 1.2.3 Economy and commerce 1.2.4 Education 1.3 Linguistic background 1.3.1 The language development situation 1.3.2 Linguistic variation according to published accounts 1.4 Other background information 2 Purpose of the current field study 2.1 Research questions 2.2 Concepts, indicators, and instruments 3 Methods of the current field study 3.1 Selection of datapoints 3.2 Survey instruments 3.2.1 Wordlists 3.2.2 Recorded Text Tests 3.2.3 Post-RTT Individual Sociolinguistic Questionnaire 3.2.4 Group Sociolinguistic Questionnaire 3.2.5 Leader sociolinguistic questionnaire 3.3 Official partnership 3.4 Research ethics 4 Results and interpretation 4.1 Wordlist results: String edit distance analysis 4.2 Wordlist results: Tone systems 4.3 RTT results 4.3.1 RTT results: Factors in interpretation ii 4.3.2 RTT results: Interpretation 4.4 SLQ results 4.4.1 RTT pre-screening and post-RTT SLQ results 4.4.2 Group and leader SLQ results 5 Summary and conclusions 5.1 Answers to our research questions 5.2 Recommended future research Appendix A: Map of the Dejing dialect area showing survey datapoints Appendix B: Informed Consent scripts Appendix C: Gedney chart and wordlist Appendix D: Wordlist, storyteller, and RTT participant screening forms Appendix E: SLQ instruments Appendix F: Average RTT scores References iii Acknowledgements The title page of this report lists only three people’s names, but it would be absurd to claim that this paper represented the work of only three individuals. We three are very grateful to the Guangxi Minorities Language and Scripts Work Commission for their partnership in this project. We can safely say that this project would not have happened without their cooperation, and we hope that they find the final results of this project worth the wait. Thanks are also due to the Jingxi County Language and Scripts Work Office, both for consultation with them in selecting the many field locations within Guangxi and for kindly making their van and driver available to us for the four months of fieldwork. Likewise, we would like to thank the Napo County Language and Scripts Work Office and the Debao County Minority Affairs Bureau for the information they provided, for their help in selecting datapoints in those counties, and for arranging transportation for us during fieldwork. All of the staff at these offices deserve credit for their contribution to this project and heart-felt thanks for their warmth and hospitality. In the course of our fieldwork, we were welcomed into many homes and offices by residents of the towns and villages where we worked. Our thanks also go to them for making our work possible, and for helping us to feel at home even in the remotest parts of Guangxi. Thanks are also due to the many survey participants who provided the data that this report is based on—telling and listening to stories, providing wordlists and patiently correcting the pronunciations of the fieldworkers, and answering the many (sometimes strange) questions that we asked. Their names are not here, but the ultimate benefit of this work should be for them. We would also like to thank our SIL colleagues who helped at various stages of this work: Bruce Hansen, who arranged the partnership that made this possible; Eric Johnson, Sue Hasselbring, John Clifton, and participants at the 2008 Asia-Eurasia- Pacific Language Survey Caucus and writing workshop, who helped in survey design and in background research; Andy Castro and Royce Flaming, who helped us design some of the instruments and get started on fieldwork; and Cathryn Yang, for help in survey design, analysis, and many helpful comments on a draft of this report. Lastly, our thanks are due to the East Asia Group Survey Budget and its funders, without which—again—none of this work would have happened at all. iv Abstract This report presents the results of a dialect intelligibility survey carried out in 2008 in the southwestern part of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, described by Zhang et al. (1999) as the Dejing dialect area of Southern Zhuang. The Zhuang varieties surveyed in this area have been grouped into the Central branch of Taic languages. This survey of nineteen locations across the dialect area found evidence from intelligibility, from similarity of wordlists (as determined by a string edit distance algorithm), and from speaker attitudes for assigning them to at least two distinct ISO 639-3 language codes, [zyg] “Yang Zhuang” and [zgm] “Minz Zhuang”. Previous published sources claimed that the variety of Yang spoken in the county seat of Jingxi County is well understood across the region. This survey tested this claim with recorded text tests (RTTs) from the county seat and a nearby rural area, and found them to be well understood across most of the Dejing area. Through comparison with the wordlist similarity results, however, this intelligibility is inherent only for a subset of the surveyed varieties; these varieties represent a cluster that is herein referred to as Yang-Nong, and includes several Zhuang varieties from this area. The high intelligibility of Jingxi Yang by speakers of other varieties is due to acquired ability in Jingxi Yang. Initial intelligibility results indicate another cluster of mutually-intelligible varieties in the area which we refer to as Min-Zong and which appears to correspond to the Minz of Yunnan Province; further fieldwork is needed to verify this in a more representative sample of these varieties. Sociolinguistic questionnaires were administered in order to measure residents’ attitudes toward these language varieties and factors relevant for language planning. The results indicate that Jingxi Yang is viewed very positively over a large area, though in particular areas local sociolinguistically-prominent varieties of Zhuang are preferred. Based on the data from wordlist similarity, inherent intelligibility, and sociolinguistic attitudes, a variety of Yang would work very well as a standard or basis for language development efforts among Yang-Nong communities, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the Zhuang in the Dejing dialect area; we propose that documentation of the ISO code [zyg] “Yang Zhuang”, previously taken to apply to most Zhuang varieties in the area, be amended to include only those Zhuang varieties that fall under Yang-Nong. Language development among Min-Zong communities in the area, accounting for another one-sixth of the areas’ Zhuang, would benefit from development based on a variety of Min or Zong; we propose that documentation of the ISO code [zgm] “Minz Zhuang”, previously thought to apply only to a small group of speakers in Yunnan Province, be amended to also include the Min-Zong communities found in this survey. Language development efforts among most of the remaining one-sixth of the Zhuang population of the Dejing area would require other varieties as a basis, but for many of these varieties, Jingxi Yang could likely still be used as a means of widespread communication. v 1 Dejing Zhuang: An introduction The Zhuang ethnic group is the largest of the fifty-five officially-recognized minority nationalities of the People’s Republic of China, with a total population of approximately 16 million in the year 2000, according to the 5th National Census of the People’s Republic of China, more than 14 million of whom live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southern China (National Bureau of Statistics 2003). Outside of Guangxi, significant Zhuang communities can be found in each of the neighboring provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangdong. Although the Chinese government recognizes a standard variety of the traditional Zhuang language [zha] 1 with a roman orthography, local varieties of Zhuang spoken across this area differ from this standard in both phonology and lexicon. Traditionally, a primary division exists between Northern and Southern varieties of Zhuang. Northern varieties have been classified within the Northern group of the Tai branch of the Tai-Kadai language family, along with neighboring languages like Bouyei [pcc] and some languages found in other locations, such as Yoy [yoy] of Thailand and Laos. Southern varieties have been classified within the Central group of the Tai branch, along with neighboring languages like Nung [nut] and Tày [tyz] of Vietnam (Edmondson and Solnit 1997b). These two major groups can in turn be divided into a handful of different local speech varieties. The recent Zhuang-Chinese-English Dictionary (Luo et al. 2005:1234, based on the work of Zhang et al. 1999) lists a total of twelve varieties of Zhuang within Guangxi and Yunnan. Many of these varieties have a relatively high shared cognate count (70% or higher), but a relatively low degree of mutual intelligibility. Because of these low intelligibility levels, Western linguists have chosen to describe these varieties as distinct languages, as reflected in the current set of ISO-639 language codes. Most Chinese literature, however, refers to varieties at this level as dialects, and to the entire Zhuang group as a single language, as reflected in the use of [zha] as a macro-language code for all Zhuang varieties.
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