The Central Loloish languages, also known as Central Ngwi, is a branch of
Loloish languages
The Loloish languages, also known as Yi (like the Yi people) and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of 50–100 Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily in the Yunnan province of Southwestern China. They are most closely related to Bur ...
in Bradley (1997). It is not used in Lama's (2012) classification. Central Loloish is also not supported in Satterthwaite-Phillips' (2011) computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages.
[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.]
Languages
Lama (2012) considers Central Loloish to be
paraphyletic
Paraphyly is a taxonomic term describing a grouping that consists of the grouping's last common ancestor and some but not all of its descendant lineages. The grouping is said to be paraphyletic ''with respect to'' the excluded subgroups. In co ...
, and splits up Bradley's (1997) Central Loloish into the following independent branches of Loloish. The
Lawu language group has been added from Yang (2012)
and Hsiu (2017).
*
Lisoish languages:
Lisu
Lisu may refer to:
*Lisu people, an ethnic group of the mountainous regions of Yunnan (China), Arunachal Pradesh (India), northern Myanmar and Thailand
*Lisu language, Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Lisu people
**Fraser script or Old Lisu A ...
,
Lolopo,
Lipo,
Lalo,
Taloid languages, etc.
*Nusoish languages:
Nusu,
Zauzou (Rouruo)
*Lahoish languages:
Lahu,
Kucong The Kucong () are an ethnic group in China. They are considered one of the poorest minorities in the country. There are around 80,000 Kucong people, living primarily in the Mojiang, Xinping, and Mengla counties of China's Yunnan Province. Some li ...
*
Lawoish languages:
Lawu,
Awu,
Lewu[Hsiu, Andrew. 2017. ]
The Lawu languages: footprints along the Red River valley corridor
'.[Yang, Cathryn. 2012]
Phonology sketch and classification of Lawu, an undocumented Ngwi language of Yunnan
In ''Linguistic Discovery'', Volume 10, Issue 2, Year 2012. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College.
*
Jinuo
Lisoish is the largest and most diverse group.
Jinuo is classified as a
Hanoish (Southern Loloish) language in Lama (2012).
Innovations
Pelkey (2011:367) lists the following as Central Ngwi innovations.
*Proto-Ngwi tone categories 1 and 2: tone splitting that is widespread
*Proto-Ngwi tone category 2 splits to *glottal-prefixed initials (higher-pitched reflexes) and *non-glottal-prefixed initials (lower-pitched reflexes; with a subsequent flip-flop in Lahu)
*Proto-Ngwi tone category L prefixed stop initials > high/rising pitch reflexes
*Family group classifiers paradigmatized with disyllabic forms, vowel leveling, and other systemic changes
*Burmic extensive paradigm is moderately grammaticalized; more than Southern Ngwi, but fewer than Northern Ngwi
*
Lexical innovations for 'dog' and 'fire'
References
*Bradley, David (1997).
Tibeto-Burman languages and classification. In ''Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, Papers in South East Asian linguistics''. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
*Lama, Ziwo Qiu-Fuyuan (2012).
Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages'. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington.
*Pelkey, Jamin. 2011. ''Dialectology as Dialectic: Interpreting Phula Variation''. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
{{Lolo-Burmese languages