Native to China ISO 639-3 nmy | Native speakers 5,000 (2007) Glottolog namu1246 | |
Language family Sino-Tibetan
Lolo-Burmese or Qiangic
Naxic
Namuzi | ||
Namuyi (Namuzi; autonym: na˥˦mʑi˥˦) is a poorly attested Loloish and more specifically a Tibeto-Burman language of Sichuan and Tibet. It has also been classified as Qiangic by Sun Hongkai (2001) and Guillaume Jacques (2011). The eastern and western dialects have low mutual intelligibility. In Sichuan, it is spoken in Muli County and Mianning County. The language is endangered and the amount of speakers with fluency is decreasing year by year, as most teenagers do not speak the language, instead speaking the Sichuan dialect of Chinese.
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Geographical Distribution
Namuyi is a language spoken in Mianning County in Dongfeng Village and Laoya Village and Xichang City in Dashui Village and Xiangshui Village. It is also spoken in Muli and Yanyuan of the Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture and Jiulong County in the Ganzi Autonomous Prefecture.
Dialect
The Namuyi language is subdivided into two different dialects, the dialect of spoken by the people around Muli, and the dialect of those spoken in Mianning. The dialects differ mainly in phonology, where the Mianning and Yanyuan dialect have few consonant clusters as opposed to the Mianning and Xichang dialect.
Phonology
There are 40 single-consonant initials in the Namuyi language. Namuyi also has ten phonemic vowels, /i/ for [i], /e/ for [e], /ɛ/ for [ɛ], /ɫ/ for [ʃ,ɯ] /ʉ/ for [y], /ə/ for [ə], /a/ for [a], /u/ for [u], /o/ for [o], and /ɔ/ for [ɔ]. There is no phonological vowel length, though speakers can lengthen a vowel in the first syllable at times to emphasize a word.