Lewu 乐舞 is an unclassified extinct Loloish language of

Jingdong Yi Autonomous County Jingdong Yi Autonomous County () is an autonomous county in the west-central part of Yunnan Province, China. It is the northernmost county-level division of the prefecture-level city of Pu'er. Administrative divisions In the present, Jingdong Y ...

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. The Lewu are officially classified by the Chinese government as ethnic Yao people.

Demographics

According to the ''Jingdong County Gazetteer'' (1994:519), ethnic Yao numbered 3,889 individuals in 1990, and lived mainly in Chaqing 岔箐 and Dasongshu 大松树 Villages of Taizhong Township 太忠乡. Yao language speakers, known as the Lewu Yao 乐舞瑶族, are found in Puya Village 普牙村, Chaqing Township 岔箐乡 (''Jingdong County Ethnic Gazetteer'' 2012:144).

Classification

Lewu may have been related to the Lawu language of Xinping County,

, but classification remains uncertain due to the paucity of data.Hsiu, Andrew. 2017.
The Lawu languages: footprints along the Red River valley corridor
'.

Vocabulary

A word list of the Lewu Yao language is transcribed using

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

in the ''Jingdong County Ethnic Gazetteer'' (2012:144-145). The language is already extinct, and was recorded in 1985 from 85-year-old Zhu Zhaojin 祝兆金 of Puya Village 普牙村, who could remember only some words.

References

Sources

*Hsiu, Andrew. 2017.
The Lawu languages: footprints along the Red River valley corridor
'. {{Lolo-Burmese languages Loloish languages Languages of China