The Greater Bai or simply Bai languages () are a putative group of
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
proposed by
Zhengzhang, a linguist, in 2010, who argues that
Bai and
Caijia are
sister language
In historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the o ...
s.
[Zhèngzhāng Shàngfāng ��张尚芳 2010. Càijiāhuà Báiyǔ guānxì jí cígēn bǐjiào ��家话白语关系及词根比较 In Pān Wǔyún and Shěn Zhōngwěi ��悟云、沈钟伟(eds.). Yánjūzhī Lè, The Joy of Research ��究之乐-庆祝王士元先生七十五寿辰学术论文集 II, 389–400. Shanghai: Shanghai Educational Publishing House.] In contrast,
Sagart (2011) argues that Caijia and the
Waxiang
Waxiang (; ) is a divergent variety of Chinese, spoken by the Waxiang people, an unrecognized ethnic minority group in the northwestern part of Hunan province, China. Waxiang is a distinct language, very different from its surrounding Southwest ...
language of northwestern
Hunan
Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi ...
constitute an early split off from
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...
.
[Sagart, Laurent. 2011]
Classifying Chinese dialects/Sinitic languages on shared innovations
Talk given at Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale, Norgent sur Marne. Additionally,
Longjia and
Luren are two extinct languages of western
Guizhou
Guizhou (; formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked province in the southwest region of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the province. Guizhou borders the autonomous region of Guangxi to t ...
closely related to Caijia (Guizhou 1984).
[Guizhou provincial ethnic classification commission ��州省民族识别工作队 1984. ''Report on ethnic classification issues of the Nanlong people (Nanjing-Longjia)'' ��龙人（南京-龙家）族别问题调查报告 m.s.][Guizhou Province Gazetteer: Ethnic Gazetteer ��州省志. 民族志(2002). Guiyang: Guizhou Ethnic Publishing House ��州民族出版社]
Languages
The languages are:
*
Bai
*
Cai–Long languages:
[Hölzl, Andreas. 2021]
Longjia (China) - Language Contexts
''Language Documentation and Description'' 20, 13-34. Caijia,
Longjia,
Luren
Hölzl (2021) shows that
Caijia,
Longjia, and
Luren are all closely related to each other as part of a linguistic group that he calls ''Ta–Li'' or ''Cai–Long''.
Bai has over a million speakers, but Longjia and Luren may both be extinct, while Caijia is highly endangered with approximately 1,000 speakers. The
Qixingmin people of
Weining County, Guizhou may have also spoken a Greater Bai language, but currently speak
Luoji.
Similarities among
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...
,
Waxiang
Waxiang (; ) is a divergent variety of Chinese, spoken by the Waxiang people, an unrecognized ethnic minority group in the northwestern part of Hunan province, China. Waxiang is a distinct language, very different from its surrounding Southwest ...
, Caijia, and Bai have been pointed out by Wu & Shen (2010).
Gong Xun (2015) has suggested that Bai may be an outlier Sinitic language with a
Qiangic substratum
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or su ...
, noting that Bai has both a Sino-Bai vocabulary layer and a pre-Bai vocabulary layer. Gong (2015) also suggested that the
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...
layer in Bai is more similar to early
3rd-century central varieties of Old Chinese in
Ji,
Yan, Si, and
Yu that display the phonological innovation from
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...
*l̥ˤ- > *xˤ-, than to the eastern Old Chinese varieties (i.e.
Qingzhou and
Xuzhou
Xuzhou (徐州), also known as Pengcheng (彭城) in ancient times, is a major city in northwestern Jiangsu province, China. The city, with a recorded population of 9,083,790 at the 2020 census (3,135,660 of which lived in the built-up area ma ...
, etc.) that later impacted
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
, which show
OC *l̥ˤ- > *tʰˤ- >
MC th-. This east-west dialectal division in Old Chinese has also been noted by Baxter & Sagart (2014:113-114).
See also
*
List of unrecognized ethnic groups of Guizhou
*
Greater Bai comparative vocabulary list (Wiktionary)
References
{{Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan languages