Samei (autonym: ') is a

Loloish language The Loloish languages, also known as Yi in China and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of fifty to a hundred Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in the Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to Burmese and its rel ...

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

closely related to Sani (Bradley 2005). It is spoken in 47 villages in and around Ala Township 阿拉彝族乡, just southeast of downtown Kunming, as well as in 7 villages in western Yiliang County (''Ethnologue''). There are about 20,000 speakers out of an estimated 28,000 ethnic population. Samei lexical data is also documented in Satterthwaite-Phillips (2011).

References

* *Satterthwaite-Phillips, Damian. 2011. ''Phylogenetic inference of the Tibeto-Burman languages or On the usefulness of lexicostatistics (and "Megalo"-comparison) for the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman''. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Loloish languages Languages of China {{st-lang-stub