Native to China Native speakers 83,000 (1999) | Region Sichuan ISO 639-3 jya | |
Language family Sino-Tibetan
Qiangic
Rgyalrongic
rGyalrong Dialects Situ
Japhug
Tshobdun
Showu | ||
rGyalrong (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་རོང), also rendered Jiarong or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of Rgyalrongic languages, spoken in Western Sichuan, China.
Contents
Name
The name Rgyalrong is an abbreviation of Tibetan རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང rgyal mo tsha ba rong, a historical region of Kham now mostly located inside Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan. This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎, jiāróng. It is pronounced [rɟɑroŋ] by speakers of Situ. It is a place-name and is not used by the people to designate their own language. The autonym is pronounced [kəru] in Situ and [kɯrɯ] in Japhug.
Languages
Based on mutual intelligibility, there are four rGyalrong languages:
Most early studies on Rgyalrong languages (Jin 1949, Nagano 1984, Lin 1993) focused on various dialects of Situ, and the three other languages were not studied in detail until the last decade of the 20th century. The differences between the four languages are presented here in a table of cognates. The data from Situ is taken from Huang and Sun 2002, the Japhug and Showu data from Jacques (2004, 2008) and the Tshobdun data from Sun (1998, 2006).
rGyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features, such as inverse marking (Sun and Shi 2002, Jacques 2010), ideophones (Sun 2004, Jacques 2008), and verbal stem alternations (Sun 2000, 2004, Jacques 2004, 2008). See Situ language for an example of the latter.