Based on fieldwork in bilingual communities, this study of the Yi language forms part of a series of recent reports on the contact between Chinese and the minority languages of the western regions of China. New information from actual field studies is needed for analysis and discussion of the relevant questions today at the center of growing public scrutiny, one reason for the importance of the study. The category ‘Yi language’ encompasses a sub-family or branch, divided among a number of local languages not mutually intelligible, belonging to the larger branch, Loloish (Poa & LaPolla Reference Poa, LaPolla, Miyaoka and Krauss2007). Politically/culturally, Yi refers to a minority nationality of China into which are grouped a large number speech communities of the Yi branch itself and possibly speech communities belonging to closely related branches (within Loloish). Along these dimensions of language and culture, the authors have brought to our attention research problems that are also pertinent to the situation of neighboring Tibetan and, to the northwest, the languages and communities of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The theme of the book centers on the evidence for advanced language shift toward Mandarin Chinese monolingualism in the Yi communities of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, a strong claim (150) congruent with its highly critical assessment of official educational policy and practice. At the same time, the authors appear to temper their critique by pointing to powerful objective conditions that over the years have been driving language replacement. A separate study by Gao (Reference Gao2015) highlights one of these factors – intermarriage – associated with the breakdown of community isolation, tied as it is to one that Lubei Zhang and Linda Tsung document: virtually universal access today by girls to public education that has brought an end to widespread female indigenous language monolingualism and illiteracy (49).
In this review I will discuss three research opportunities mentioned in the chapters that are relevant to East Asian language contact situations of the same kind: (i) the cognitive/linguistic correlates of language shift, related to (ii) the grammatical features of bilingual speech under conditions of sharp imbalance as described in the study, and (iii) the language–literacy relationship specific to vernacular writing, in this instance influenced by contact with the Chinese morphosyllabic system.
From the field of sociolinguistics, the term ‘shift’ is in fact more precise than ‘language loss’ or ‘attrition’ when describing the psycholinguistic process of normal replacement in bilingualism of one language system by another. Language is not ‘lost’ in the shift of Tibetan, Uyghur or Yi to Modern Standard Chinese, the replacing language. The distinction is important as we compare the findings of a language shift study involving Southern Min (Hokkien) that discussed evidence for an inherent vulnerability of one of the language systems in child bilingualism, compatible with a Replacing Language (RL) development model. In the Southern Min study (Ding Reference Ding2016), indirect evidence is presented for potentially rapid transition of first language ability to second (L2), from a cognitive point of view, not just in regard to diminished preference in use, applying the author’s Youngest Child Model (YCM). The approach of the YCM points to evidence in speakers’ performance on actual language tasks that tracks the competence transition from one dominant language to another, correlating it with the related but separate transition socially. In the same way future work in the Yi language study might be able to sample speakers’ ability, especially among child and adolescent bilinguals. A study by Tang (Reference Tang2011) of Truku (Taroko) displacement by Chinese presents a viable testing framework. Has a significant layer of school-age bilinguals undergone RL development demonstrating full age-appropriate competence in Mandarin Chinese, displacing linguistic domains of previously native-speaker level competence in Yi? Given the authors’ assessment of accelerating shift socially, is there evidence in some local populations of Mandarin Chinese dominance even during the early stages of first language acquisition?
Chapter 5, following previous work in Tsung (Reference Tsung2012), gives an account of the interesting emergence of Tuanjie hua, a contact variant product of increased second language learning of Chinese by Yi speakers. Ongoing analysis of a representative sample, as Tuanjie hua evolves, will be able to specify its potentially unique grammatical properties. The examples of Yi–Chinese bilingual speech will eventually need to distinguish among the different possibilities:
As readers will notice, this topic is related to the first, language replacement. However, it is important to point out that language shift is not always accompanied, obligatorily (for example as a causal factor), by convergence or a type of high-incidence bilingual speech.
It is in convergence, the third scenario, where a new language emerges in the sense that intelligibility comes to be significantly affected for monolingual speakers of both Chinese and the local language. In the example of relexification a massive replacement of vocabulary from the donor coincides with the preservation of the receiving language’s phonology and grammar. Then Wutun might serve as another model for analyzing deep-going and highly interactive language contact. Here, the convergence is with Amdo Tibetan resulting in a ‘branch of the Sinitic group’, a form of Northwest Mandarin ‘unintelligible to speakers of other forms of Mandarin’ (2), therefore, strictly speaking, not a dialect of Mandarin. Converse to the example of relexification, Wutun has acquired many phonological and grammatical patterns atypical of Chinese (becoming agglutinating with extensive suffixing and evidencing the loss of lexical tone) and new cultural vocabulary while mainly preserving a Sinitic lexicon (3–4). According to Sandman, Wutun speaking ability is attested among all generations, who in turn self-identify as Tibetan. Evidence of Wutun’s linguistic autonomy is the common perception of it in the wider Tibetan-speaking community as foreign or aberrant (8–12). At the same time, we should keep in mind that BML, as outlined in these two examples, might simply represent the clearest and most unambiguous case of new language creation. Future data could propose new criteria for a fourth category that describes an autonomous language variety. The argument, here, would be that the first two, by themselves, do not. Needless to say, these research problems are part of a lively debate in bilingual studies to which the description of Tuanjie hua can make an important contribution.
Chapters 2, 4 and 6 consider the ongoing discussion among language planners and communities on the use of the modern standard Yi syllabaries and the traditional Yi script. While the latter corresponds mainly to a problem of basic research, it is one of far-reaching theoretical importance, and deserves continued attention by Yi language scholars. In this work across East Asia, significant progress has been made toward consensus on the adaptations of the Chinese characters in the early writing systems of Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the Zhuang language (Handel Reference Handel2019). Traditional Yi writing might represent an exceptional case where rather than being one of adapting morphosyllabic Literary Chinese, roughly during the same historical period, Yi scribes may have developed a syllabic script. Thus, the relationship could have been one of superficial, or less substantial, influence from the Chinese model. Chinese influence might have been a factor in the selection of the syllable as the linguistic unit to correspond to the grapheme, as opposed to adopting a alphabetic script as in Tibetan and Uyghur writing. In the end it is possible that the design features of early Yi writing marked it as qualitatively different from Chinese writing.
The most difficult research question is that of origins: a proto-writing pictography or a syllabary of unknown consistency (Wasilewska Reference Wasilewska2014). In the first case, Yi writing evolved on the pattern of the early Chinese characters toward a full (albeit inconsistent) morphosyllabic system. In the second, while a certain number of graphemes can be identified as borrowings from Chinese, the system was basically syllabic from the beginning (with time becoming more variable and inconsistent for different interesting reasons). If evidence turns out to favor the traditional Yi syllabary hypothesis, this conclusion would be interesting considering the contrast with Vietnamese Nôm and traditional Zhuang writing that, in adapting and transforming the Chinese characters, preserved their overall morphosyllabic design (Handel Reference Handel2019). The interesting factor to keep in mind is that the grammar of the Yi languages shows key typological parallels with Vietnamese and Zhuang, and by extension with Chinese (isolating, absence of affixal morphology, extensive syllabomophemic homophony) that ‘should have’ tipped the balance toward a similar morphosyllabic solution in the orthography. The ancient Vietnamese and Zhuang scripts departed from the Korean and Japanese solutions precisely because of the contrasting linguistic patterns of Korean and Japanese (among others, agglutinating, extensive inflectional morphology). If the syllabary hypothesis is correct, why, despite the linguistic affinity with Chinese, Vietnamese and Zhuang, did Yi evolve from the beginning toward a syllabary, unlike its neighbors? Wasilewska (Reference Wasilewska2014), while favoring the Yi syllabary hypothesis, presents a good summary of the current debate; Bradley (Reference Bradley2009) appears to present an opposing view. Aside from the purely theoretical questions in play, a practical application for the work of language preservation presents itself (one that is relevant to the conceptual thread that runs throughout all the chapters of the book). Study of the traditional writing system is important for creating a resource for the recovery of the Yi literary heritage and language history, with intact surviving manuscripts remaining to be analyzed, or to be even deciphered completely, numbering over 100,000. Discussion of the complexities of the modern standardized Yi syllabaries (presented in Chapter 2) needs to be deferred for another occasion, as well as that of the definitive 20th-century orthographic solutions, not complex, in Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
These lines of research can complement the sociolinguistic approach of the authors for developing a model for understanding language shift. Necessary to point out however is the most serious impediment to discussion of the research questions proposed by the authors in the Yi language study: the practice of imprisoning minority language educators and linguists for activity in our field protected by the Chinese constitution. Independent of the differing views on the status of the minority languages in western China and their prospects, the panorama of bilingualism in this richly diverse region that the book provides has moved the discussion forward.
